...the scary thing is, you can see by the seriousness of the film's tone that everybody who worked on the project must have had the best intentions.
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I ask you, where is Mickey Rourke when you need him? Or Brando or Dean?
"Deuces Wild" is a gloomy, depressing, ultraviolent piece of movie blather about Brooklyn street gangs in the late 1950s. It generates about as much realism and human drama as a Cracker Jack prize, using stereotypes and clichés in literally every scene, sometimes outright pilfering from other films. The plot, the script, the characters, the cast, the acting, the direction, the locations, the music, the cinematography, nothing in this film works, except to induce a kind of numbing effect by the time it's over. And the scary thing is, you can see by the seriousness of the film's tone that everybody who worked on the project must have had the best intentions. Win a few, lose a few, I guess.
The narrator, a young man named Bobby (Brad Renfro), tells us it's the summer of '58--the summer the Dodgers left Brooklyn, the summer Dion and the Belmonts were playing on the radio, and the summer he fell in love. It was also the summer Marco (Norman Reedus) came home from prison, and "the streets of Sunset Park ran red with blood." That pretty much sets the mood for the film's period atmosphere and old-fashioned melodrama.
Most of the film's difficulty, though, is that it can't make up its mind which character it wants to be about. Although Bobby narrates the movie and experiences a "Romeo and Juliet" type courtship, it's largely his older brother Leon's story. Leon (Stephen Dorff) started a gang called the Deuces, whose job it was to protect the block against rival gangs, like the one that hangs out across the street, the Vipers. Bobby is neither as smart nor as tough as his brother, nor does he get as many good scenes in the movie. But a local Mob guy named Fritzy (played by Matt Dillon, an old hand at nostalgic fifties films) really runs the neighborhood. He sort of indulgently looks on at the gang rivalry until it gets out of hand.
None of the gang members seem to work at anything resembling real jobs, despite the fact that there must be twenty-five or thirty of them in each group, all in their early twenties. Bobby tells us they sell bootleg cigarettes and illegal fireworks and run a little bookmaking. These petty crimes hardly seem enough to keep one going, but, then, the only thing these guys do every day is hang out at the soda parlor, so how much money do you need to get along?
Fifties' do-wop music plays on the jukeboxes and in the background of most scenes, until some action occurs and then it changes to something resembling present-day rock and jazz. Furthermore, there's an abundance of hard profanity that comes from everyone in the film, a lot more than I ever remember hearing back then and I was in high school in '58. So, don't expect much consistency here; it's a film about the fifties with a twenty-first century sensibility for music and language.
Anyway, everything is proceeding swimmingly until tough-guy Marco gets out of jail, looking for the guy he thinks ratted on him and put him away, namely Leon. When Marco comes back, all hell breaks loose, none of it very convincing. Indeed, nothing about this film rings true. I already mentioned the music and language; how about the sight of practically everyone continuously yelling and screaming at one another, everyone acting tough and macho, everyone giving everyone else the endless evil eye, everyone looking over his shoulder to see if he's going to be jumped any minute? Were people ever really like this? Was I the only person happy in '58? Well, I didn't live in Brooklyn. These folks even talk in clichés: "Fancy meeting you here," "I always go for the long shot," "Serious as a heart attack," that kind of thing.
Naturally, along with the conflict of Marco's gunning for Leon, Bobby has to fall in love with the sister of one of the rival gang members. Annie (Fairuza Balk) is at first cool toward Bobby's advances, but when it's love at first sight, what can you do? Expect everything to happen you have in mind right now. Expect gang fights (the one in the park is a dead ringer for the one in Francis Coppola's film version of S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders"), and heartbreak, and even a tough old priest, Father Aldo (Vincent Pastore), thrown into the mix. Lots of toughness here; it's the keyword of the movie.
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[release]10486[/release]