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Directed By
Nick Cassavetes
Written By:
Nick Cassavetes
Cast:
Bruce Willis, Matthew Barry, Emile Hirsch, Vincent Kartheiser, Justin Timberlake, Shawn Hatosy, Alex Solowitz, Harry Dean Stanton, Ben Foster, Laura Nativo, Fernando Vargas, Alec Vigil, Frank Cassavetes, Nicole Dubos, Regina Rice
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Alpha Dog (2007)
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Movie Review by Jen
January 27th, 2007
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Alpha Dog is the story of bad parents, spoiled american youth, drugs, and the gangsta rap mentality of California in 1999. Nick Cassavetes does an amazing job of capturing all of this in the film, which he wrote and directed.
The film opens with a documentary style interview with Bruce Willis, who plays the father of Johnny Truelove, the youngest man ever on the FBI's most wanted list. It then follows Truelove as he engages in a battle of wills with Jake Muzursky, a man who owes him twelve hundred dollars as a result of a drug deal gone wrong. In a chance encounter, Truelove kidnaps Muzursky's younger brother and holds him for three days in one of the most shocking crimes ever committed.
Once fifteen year old zach is kidnapped by the drug dealer, the focus really shifts to his posse of friends, who are responsible for the boy for a few days. At least thirty-eight people see him, and yet at no point does he try to escape, or does anyone else try to call the police or help him.
I was very impressed with a lot of the framing in the film, and the use of wipes and split screens, which can usually look very amaturish and over the top in movies, but played very nicely here. The writing was more than adequete and compelling, although I thought the ending was fairly anticlimactic. The story is based on actual events, however, and not much can be done to change the ending.
The acting, however, was what blew me away. Emile Hirsch does a great job of showing the psuedo bad boy with no spine that Truelove (and his real life alter ego, Jesse James Hollywood) really is. However, the ensemble cast is really the backbone for the film. Justin Timberlake did admirably for his first film, and Sharon Stone, Bruce Willis, Lukas Haas, Vincent Kartheiser, and others all really gave their all in every scene as well.
The most impressive performance, however, in my mind, was Ben Foster, who played Zach's crystal meth addicted older brother Jake. Jake is the reason that Zach is kidnapped, and his character is both witty and terrifying and heartbreaking, strong and vulnerable, and so very layered that I was absolutely blown away. I read somewhere that Ben Foster spent time with actual crystal meth addicts to prepare for the role, and used special (and dangerous) eyedrops to keep his pupils permanently dialated for the film. It shows. He was incredibly committed to his character and stole every scene he was in. This is not to downplay the performances of the other people, or the great writing and directing by Cassavetes, which really hits home about our generation. It's just overall definitely a film worth checking out.
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