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Alpha DogThere's one thing you'll remember about Alpha Dog: Sharon Stone in a fat suit. Love or hate this tale of wannabe teen gangsters in SoCal, it's Stone's turn as a bereaved mother carrying several pounds of padding that's destined to enter the movie trivia books. Almost totally unrecognizable from her earlier (slimmer) scenes, Stone's roly-poly re-appearance is so outrageous, so utterly unconvincing that it upends the entire movie. It's as if someone spliced a scene from the Farrellys' Shallow Hal into the projector as a joke.
If Alpha Dog were a better film, Stone's fat suit faux pas might have been a tragedy. Instead, it's just one of a series of missteps from writer-director Nick Cassavetes (John Q, The Notebook).
The story's based on the real-life case of Californian teenager Nicholas Markowitz, who was kidnapped by a gang of teenagers, led by Jesse James Hollywood, in 2000 over his half-brother's bad drug debt. What started out as a semi-prank - a piece of macho bravado - eventually went horribly wrong leading to murder charges and a court case that (at the time of the film's release in 2007) is still ongoing.
Taking this true crime as his starting point, Cassavetes turns in a "Where are your kids?" melodrama that combines flashes of insight with much that's dull or simply ridiculous (hello, Fat Sharon.) Emile Hirsch leads the impressive young cast as Johnny Truelove, a barely-out-of-diapers drug dealer working for his old school gangster dad (Willis). Brainwashed by hip-hop videos, Johnny decides to take his revenge on a bad debtor (Foster) by getting his crew to kidnap the guy's 15-year-old half-brother Zack (Yelchin). At first it's nothing more than a badly thought out prank; the guys hang out with Stolen Boy and take him on a wild tour of SoCal's party circuit. But then fate intervenes.
It's a film that wants to be authentic but actually seems to be a mishmash of other sources: the youthful energy recalling Larry Clark's movies; the tattooed, aggressive kids straight out of American History X, the hip drugginess lifted from Spun. Cassavetes - now in his forties, and old enough to be an alien to this strain of youth culture - never convinces, his street-smart dialogue plowing a field that Tarantino left fallow long ago. Even taking into account its early 2000s setting, it feels dated.
That said, there are some pleasures to be had here. Justin Timberlake's performance as the kindly stoner given the responsibility of minding Stolen Boy is a real treat (no, seriously). Ben Foster gives a truly jaw-dropping turn as Stolen Boy's wired half-brother, a performance so good it's worth recommending the movie on that basis alone. Charging through his scenes with fury, a vein on his head pumping with enough energy to power half of Los Angeles, he's truly terrifying, but vanishes halfway through the story and never gets a chance to unleash the hell we expect. It's a missed opportunity that pretty much sums up Alpha Dog's capacity to both satisfy and frustrate.
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