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Film
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Deuces Wild
Bad boys Stephen Dorff and Brad Renfro try to keep their 1958 Brooklyn neighborhood safe from thugs and drug dealers in Scott Kalvert’s latest film.
Friday, May 3, 2002
By Susan Michals
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Deuces Wild, the latest film from Basketball Diaries director
Scott Kalvert, will have quite an impact on its audience - it will leave them
jumping out of their seats… and running for the door. A streetwise combo
platter obviously taking a few leads from Rebel Without A Cause, West Side
Story and The Warriors, Deuces Wild is nothing more than a
period piece overloaded with hoodlum clichés and caricatures.
The story revolves around brothers Leon (Stephen Dorff) and Bobby (an overblown
Brad Renfro), circa 1958. Three years prior, their brother Allie overdosed,
a product of the drug infested neighborhood haven provided by Marco (Norman
Reedus). Leon and Bobby are now two tough talking guys determined to maintain
a clean way of life for their Brooklyn neighborhood, which until now, has been
easy, since Marco's behind bars. With the rest of their gang members (including
that James Dean look-alike winner, James Franco) they are "The Deuces",
a group of men shielding the world they live in from drugs and mayhem and good
scripts. Day after day, they battle "The Vipers", the other bad boys
on the block, who want nothing more than to deal smack to little tykes such
as the badly miscast Frankie Muniz. But wait… there's evil on the horizon.
When Marco is released from prison, he is determined to get his hands on the
man he assumed sent him to the slammer in the first place - Leon. Compound this
with the budding but doomed romance between Renfro and Annie "The Ice Cube"
(Fairuza Balk) sister of arch rival Jimmy Pockets and you've got mayhem, conflicts
in loyalty, and good wholesome switchblade fun just waiting to explode.
More cable access than feature film, Deuces Wild cares little about
its characters, as evidenced by the poorly written script by Christopher Gambale
and Paul Kimatian. It seems as though they couldn't think up proper adjectives
for a good portion of the story, so as a filter, they decided to just throw
in about 400 or 500 uses of a profane word beginning with the letter f. Compound
this with a pseudo 1950's Brooklyn that looks more like the MGM back lot and
what you've got is about an hour and a half of erratic bouts of dullsville.
Individuals are given hoodlum-type names like Scooch, Jimmy Pockets, Fritzy,
and of course, that villain of villains, Marco Vendetti (no doubt a calculated
name, wise on the part of the screenwriters - too bad some of that creativity
couldn't sneak its way into the script). All are one-dimensional and flat, and
Renfro in particular goes through the same moves and machinations scene after
scene, the same unchanged look on his face throughout. His dramatic skills in
this movie range from A, to almost B, though even that is a bit of a stretch.
More than anything else, he's just plain stupid throughout. Casting for the
whole movie is way off, particularly Frankie Muniz who can't seem to escape
his Malcolm persona. His quirkiness doesn't work here; he is stilted
and uncomfortable, just like the rest of the cast. It's as if they don't know
what to do with their time in front of the camera, making it nothing short of
painful for us, and themselves.
The biggest disappointment comes in the form of an actor who harkens from a
myriad of better films that showcase this same time period - Matt Dillon. He
should be ashamed of himself, or maybe, his agent should be for allowing his
client to set foot on the set of Deuce Wilds. For Dillon, a veteran of
great movies like Rumblefish and The Outsiders, to revisit this
era once again make him come off like the guy who's graduated from high school
and can't move on - he wants to stay and hang out with the kids because they
look up to him as long as he possibly can.
| Maybe Kalvert wanted to make Deuces Wild quasi-homage to some of the aforementioned
films; or maybe, with all the obvious camp and rebel bravado sewn in so tightly,
it was more his goal to make a mockery of it. If it was the intention of Kalvert,
Gambale and Kimatian to infiltrate their script with every stereotypical hoodlum
cliché from every movie covering Brooklyn bad boys, they were on the
money. Too bad their movie isn't. | |
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