Reviewed by Max Foizey.

Release Date: January 12, 2007
Directed By: Nick Cassavetes
Starring: Bruce Willis, Sharon Stone, Justin Timberlake
Rating: R

I encourage you to watch "She's So Lovely" or "The Notebook" because those are some of the quality films Nick Cassavetes has directed. His latest, "Alpha Dog," is not one of them. I respect Cassavetes for moving so far away from Nicolas Sparks territory, but all we get here is a quasi-cautionary tale about what happens when 'Lord of the Flies' meets "Laguna Beach."

Take a bunch of rich kids, throw drugs and alcohol in there, add absent/apathetic parents, and a pinch of teen sex, and you've got a pot of O.C. UH-OH ready to boil over.

In 1999, young drug dealer Jesse James Hollywood (here it's Johnny Truelove), couldn't pay a debt of around 12 hundred dollars he owed to a crystal meth addict, so he decided to kidnap the fifteen year old kid brother of this addict in hopes of holding him for ransom. Gotta love that teenage logic, right? Things start in a bad place and just get worse from there.

Most of the acting is spot-on, with standouts being Emile Hirsch as teenage ringleader Truelove, Dominique Swain (looking more like Kiki Dunst every day) as a histrionic voice of reason, and especially Ben Foster as drug-crazed Jack Mazursky, older brother of Zack, the stolen boy (portrayed by Anton Yelchin, he of the kind face).  The adults are less impressive than the kids. Bruce Willis' part is menacing but small, Harry Dean Stanton doesn't do much more than look deceased, and someone needs to tell Sharon Stone that wearing a fat suit won't guarantee her an Oscar.

Somewhat surprisingly, Justin Timberlake (or 'Pre-Fed,' as I like to call him) is not the weak link in this movie. He does a great job as Frankie, a hard-partying teen with a heart of gold. The downfall of this movie doesn't lie with the actors, but with its failure to find its proper footing. After sitting through almost two hours of constant cussing, misogyny, and violence, I wondered whose side the filmmakers were on.

This is a frustrating film. The subject matter is endlessly intriguing, but the execution is way off. I don't think director Cassavetes is trying to glorify the actions of these kids at all, but one could get that impression from just about everything except the last five minutes of the film. It's a good lesson in how important music is to mood in motion pictures. I think if you substituted some Wilco tunes for the gang-banging jams in certain scenes, the film would have conveyed the unsettling path these kids were on instead of halfway endorsing their actions as nothing more than good old-fashioned teen shenanigans. Only once, when David Bowie's "Wild is the Wind" is used, does the mood seem right in this picture.

I'll admit I was distracted while watching the film because of a mother who thought it was just peachy to have her three young children in the theater watching this hard-R rated film. When a parent finds no issue exposing their own children to wanton sex and violence, it's not hard to believe "Alpha Dog" is based on a true story.

In addition to hosting 'Max on Movies' on Saturday on 97.1 FM Talk, Max appears weekly on the Dave Glover Show Fridays at 5pm. A member of the Saint Louis Gateway Film Critics Association, Max has written about film and theatre for various print and Web media, and appeared as guest critic on various nationally syndicated radio shows. Max lives in Missouri and yet is a diehard Miami Dolphins fan. He was very glad he saw this picture before seeing "Omega Dog."