Alpha Dog film review

certificate_15

ALPHA DOG

Fact blurs into celluloid fiction in Nick Cassavetes' Alpha Dog, which takes its cue from the case of Jesse James Hollywood, a smalltime drugs dealer who became one of the FBI's Most Wanted after the kidnapping of a teenage boy in LA's Valley area in 2000.

It's a trip into the heart of darkness of America's disaffected youth which recounts the lifestyles of a gang of teenagers who turn a decent profit selling marijuana before the inevitable excesses of their behaviour leads to a turn for the worst.

Not for nothing does gang leader Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) have a poster of Al Pacino as Scarface adorning the living room of his recently acquired high end residence. Here he lives in world of drugs, fast cars and loose women, and is surrounded by a group of sycophantic followers played variously by the likes of Shawn Hatosy and Justin Timberlake.

But when Truelove begins a vendetta with user and non-payer Jake Mazursky (Ben Foster), his exotic lifestyle starts to fall apart at the seams. Truelove hatches a plot to kidnap Jake's younger brother Zack (Anton Yelchin), much to the dismay of his nervy mother (Sharon Stone), and what begins as a simple hostage-for-cash scenario gradually takes a darker tone. Bruce Willis pops up intermittently in a cameo as Truelove's proud father.

The cast all do a good job in portraying the empty lives and petty power struggles that dominate the group, but there's no escaping the fact that this is a pretty annoying bunch of characters who all talk in a patois akin to the rap videos they constantly watch on MTV. As a result it's hard to latch on to anyone with much sympathy, with the unlikely exception of Justin Timberlake's Frankie, who is given the task of looking after the kidnap victim for the weekend. It's by far Timberlake's biggest onscreen role to date and is not a case of vanity casting: he really can act and brings an awful lot of energy to a difficult role.

Cassavetes became highly involved with the real-life case while preparing his film and is caught between a rock and a hard place in presenting his film as factual (the real gang leader is still in prison awaiting trial), so he is forced to dance around the facts of the matter. It's a problem that ultimately makes the film less than convincing and whatever impact it is meant to have is hampered.

Paul Hurley