Review of Alpha Dog (2006) by Jim C — 01 Feb 2011

It's a shame that it takes such a sad story to bring great talent together, but this film did a good job of that. The old school heavyweights, Bruce Willis, Sharon Stone, Harry Dean Stanton were excellent, but they were upstaged by the new school. Any excuse to see Emile Hirsch act is good enough for me, but I was also impressed by Ben Foster, Anton Yelchin, Shawn Hatosy and Justin Timberlake.

Gay, straight or dead, you still have to admit that there's a lot of eyecandy in this movie, both female and male. I actually found myself thinking that I wouldn't have minded being Anton Yelchin in the pool with the 2 hot blondes...for just a moment.

It's a tragic tale, no mistake about it, but it seems related well here. The gore is minimal in respect, one would hope, for the departed. The sex isn't overly gratuitous. The language is no worse than you'd expect, and probably cleaned up some from reality.

I found myself immersed well enough to pull for the kid, Zack. I hoped that Frankie would man up and tell Johnny to piss off and then let the kid go since they had developed something of an ersatz friendship. I hoped that the other kid, Keith, would offer Zack a get-out-of-bondage free card or some such. But, movies like this are rarely made based upon someone doing the right thing.

To play devil's advocate, it sounded like Johnny had a pretty crappy life and his 2 role models, Sonny and Cosmo, were both well known to the police. He had, though, the opportunity to do the right thing and didn't. He and Frankie even worked out a plan to have the kid go home safe and just say that he'd run away with a girl. The best laid plans of mice and suburban gangstas, I suppose...

I'd be interested if they ever release a director's cut of this film. A few of the actors didn't get to stretch out in their roles and I'd like to see that remedied. The bottom line is that a kid got killed because of some un-thought-out dim bulb idea. And that's just sad.