Review of King of New York (1990) by Paul Z — 19 Oct 2010

King of New York is another lurid exploitation film attempting to be high art by Abel Ferrara with his brooding atmospheric sense of shadows and neon, making most film noir look like shades of grey. It works at crossed purposes with itself. First it tries to establish a murky slum atmosphere and clear-cut social issues. There is an enmity between Wesley Snipes' overzealous cop/family man and Laurence Fishburne's street thug that bears a sense of tension involving racial identity and the tragic pitfalls of the black community, also seen in Fishburne's scene in the chicken joint, and the portrayal through hard-knock cops and affluent gang bosses of injustice on the social ladder between honest public servants and phony philanthropists. Yet at the same time, the true aim is simply to go way over the top in an endeavor to have every character be swaggeringly cool and find every excuse to blow someone away, show some tits and have a car chase.

I won't knock it for being effective at times even when it does get ridiculously excessive, such as when the completely out-of-place car chase culminates in a bloody, melodramatic stand-off showdown underneath a bridge in a Kurosawa-inspired storm. There's also Walken himself, who is always engaging even when totally hamming it up which he does here more than ever, yet who nevertheless becomes less and less the focal point as a character and more of an axis around which excessively operatic events of violence and crime revolve. These events concern a plethora of other characters including three embittered cops, Laurence Fishburne as Walken's bombastically trigger-happy right-hand man and some rather colorful drug lords. No female characters, unless you count the cops' wives who just sit, watch and cry, never say anything and you know are always around as soon as you see a shot of a baby or life at home. Or if you count the also predominantly wordless bimbos purely present literally just to do clerical work and perform sexual favors for the super-duper-cool gangsters. Woman equals receptacle here more than most crime films, and that's saying a lot. And I've seen more than enough crime films.

Oh and the collective laughing in this movie. I'd forgotten that movies for adults can be that mawkish and overdone, be full of scenes where a group of people all laugh together at the right times, even when it doesn't make sense for some of them to, where friends clasp hands when one is telling a story, where everyone is dancing to hip hop naked and doing drugs. It's only when Walken shows up in these scenarios (yes, he dances to hip hop: two fine moments) are they intrinsically interesting or superficially engaging. There should be a role in every movie for Walken. There practically is. But even though every scene he's in supplies his outlandishly audacious crime boss character with something interesting to do, however overly demonstratively, the movie is not sure what it wants to do with this character except use him as a catalyst for great action violence and scenes of masculine bluster and lead to the same descent as every other movie gang boss protagonist.

I won't say I'm not unwrapping any more presents from Ferrara. I think he's clearly got potential, but he doesn't seem to know the difference between portraying subject matter and exploiting it. He doesn't follow through the way other filmmakers do with the same sense of style and romanticism. It's got a lot going for it, except a center of focus. It's never boring, but it's more an adolescent's version of a Scorsese gangster picture if anything.