Anyone who has seen The Outsiders, Goodfellas, A Bronx Tale or Last Man Standing doesn't really need to watch this film because you've already seen it. The line up here includes a very promising cast of Steven Dourff as Leon, Brad Renfro as Bobby, Matt Dillon as Fritzy, Frankie Muniz as Scooch and Johnny Knoxville as Vince. But with all those characters comes very little character developementand leaves us with a full cast of characters that we don't care about with the small exception of Leon. We start the film with the death of Leon's brother and the imprisonment of Marko, the rival gang leader who gave his brother the drugs that killed him. Fast forward three years, Marko is out of jail and all hell is breaking loose on Leon's once peaceful block, Marko is also making a deal with Fritzy (the head of the block) to get his drugs back on the street and Leon's brother Bobby is becoming involved with the sister of a Viper. This film has everything, the rival gangs (Outsiders), the big show downs (Last Man Standing), the gangster who is in charge of everything (Bronx Tale) and the drug dealing (Goodfellas). But because of this the flim is robbed of any sort of self identity and becomes rather bogged down and boring, leading up to a conclusion that is inevidable because we have all seen it a hundred times before, just better. This film could have been a masterpeice were it put into the proper hands, but Scott Calvert is no Martin Scorsese and Matt Dillon is no Robert De Niro, so we are left satisfied to some extent, but still feel robbed of something. The lackluster direction and enormously cliched script don't help matters any. It's clear director Scott Calvert tried his hardest to be clever but his annoying camera tricks don't suit this movie well at all, in fact some of them are, at time, very hard to watch. The fight scenes are plentiful but lack any excitement due to the horrible choreograhpy and again cheesy camera movement making it hard to tell who is who. Matt Dillon show plenty of promise but is only given four scenes in the whole movie, Johnny Knoxville is a nobody that serves no importance and is hardly noticable and Frankie Muniz hardly mutters a word the whole time. I have always found Steven Dourff to have possessed a certain degree of talent but he has yet to be given a role where he can break free and show us what he is really made of, but he is still, by far, the highlight of the film. Now don't get me wrong, the movie is not a total waste and there are probably lots of people that this sort of thing will appeal to but its lack of originality cancels out any power of emotion and even though we have a cast of characters that I really didn't care about except for Leon, it's an hour and a half of my life that I don't regret.
