alpha dog

well, luckily I didn’t have high expectations for this one…because it more than lived up to them. i don’t have a whole lot to say about this. alpha dog is based on the real story of the murder of a 15 year old boy named zack muzursky. directed by nick cassavetes (the notebook), this film follows several teenagers/young 20-somethings through an escalating war between johnny truelove and jake muzursky. johnny and his friends kidnap zack (johnny’s brother) on a whim and believe they will hold him hostage until jake pays back the money he owes to johnny, without truly realizing the consequences of this. we watch as justin timberlake’s “frankie” watches over zack, and slowly befriends him, and the upsetting/cheesy conclusion of this whole situation. however, most of the film is devoted to glorifying the kids’ drug-dealing, gang-fighting, partying lifestyle. the only benefit to this is watching karen from mean girls hit a bong. i’ve never seen so much weed-smoking in one film. of course, we can’t have impressionable kids leaving a film thinking this lifestyle is something to strive for…so there’s a murder and we get post-script text letting the audience know the consequences for everyone involved. cliché much? the real murder this is based on happened in 1999, so one could argue that it was “too soon”, but that wasn’t my problem with this film. i took issue with how trivialized and stylized it all was. the actors are all young, pretty, mediocre celebrities, meant to appeal to a teen market. and even the big guns like sharon stone and bruce willis aren’t that impressive. i thought sharon stone was just bad, particularly in the scenes where she is being interviewed several years after the murder. there were even laughably bad parts, such as when ben foster (jake) is looking for johnny once his brother has been kidnapped. foster enters a party and proceeds kung-fu style to beat up all the people who approach him physically. and I was not the only one laughing. it’s an interesting story, and i’d like to know the original now that i’ve seen the film but i found it easy to forget that it wasn’t fiction. alpha dog felt like a heavy-handed fable about why you shouldn’t be a rich, spoiled, white kid pretending to be a gangster. ok, i think i’ve said enough about the cons. so, the pros: a tattooed justin timberlake.

trailer