Alpha Dog

Directed by: Nick Cassevetes
Starring: Bruce Willis Justin Timberlake Emile Hirsch Harry Dean Stanton Matthew Barry
Certificate: 15
Running time: 117mins

Normally, when asked to go and see a film starring non other than Justin Timberlake, this reviewer would run a country mile. In fact I'd run two. Pop stars in films are normally a very bad idea, I know it never stopped Madonna, but really it is one thing that shouldn’t happen. Prince just got away with it in ‘Purple Rain’, but then undid all his good work with ‘Under The Cherry Moon’. You get the picture. I have to say though; ‘Alpha Dog’ is a very different dog.

This gritty and nihilistic LA nightmare, which is based on the true life events concerning, Jesse James Hollywood, a drug dealer and hoodlum who was the youngest person ever to be on the FBI’s most wanted list. The reason this asbo wielding little nutter ended up on the list is because in 1999 he kidnapped the 15yr old brother of a rival who owed him money. From the moment they kidnapped that boy everything went a bit turbo.

Director Nick Cassavetes has taken the statements and court papers and woven together a story that plays like a teen age version of ‘Goodfellas’. Jesses James Hollywood becomes Johnny Truelove and Nicolas Markowitz becomes Zack Mazursky and so on and so forth. Due to various legal reasons the names have all been changed though the events are real, very real.

In the opening frames Sonny Truelove (Bruce Willis), is being interviewed about his son's disappearance and involvement in the kidnapping of Zack Mazursky (Anton Yelchin), Sonny puts the whole incident down to bad parenting. He is not wrong. Not everyone will like this film because it brings together some of the most despicable and unpleasant characters you will ever see together on one screen. The parents are indeed very bad parents, self obsessed, uncaring and very immature. They set no boundaries or rules for their kids, they allow them to fully take advantage of their middle class wealth and live as though they themselves are adults. It is no wonder that only one of this group of teenage reprobates actually realises that this whole kidnapping is wrong.

The film is reminiscent of Tim Hunter’s 1986 film ‘River’s Edge’, in which a high school outcast, murders his girlfriend and then shows off the body to friends, whose reaction is so ambiguous and numb that you literally cannot believe they are not screaming and shouting and locking this guy up. Both films really highlight the banality of the American teen – everyone is a ‘dude’, they are all tattooed so much you don’t know whether to look at them or read them. They live for pleasure and the acquisition of wealth and have no moral obligation to themselves or anyone around them.

As stated earlier, the film plays like a teenage ‘Goodfellas’, Timberlake, impressed me, he is no longer a teenage pop idol, he becomes a cocky, frivolous idiot who although he knows what is happening is wrong, is so scared of Johnny Truelove he is happy to roll with it. The real star of the show though is Ben Foster (‘X3’, ‘Six Feet Under’), his manic performance as Jake Mazursky is funny and terrifying as well as compelling, initially you believe this character to be a wet speed freak who could not punch his way out of a paper bag, then, he becomes the ultimate fighting machine making Bruce Lee look like Walter the Softy. Foster genuinely creates the American Begbie. Watch this guy, he is going places. The ensemble which also includes Sharon Stone, Harry Dean Stanton, Bruce Willis, Emile Hirsch and Dominique Swain is brilliant, nobody lets the side down, everyone is convincing and you will hate them all equally.

In the end, this isn’t a happy Hollywood, ‘OC’ style teen film; it is a modern tragedy that illustrates how one act of utter stupidity can completely ruin many, many lives. Not a date movie then. 

  Nickman