? A mobster’s son (James Marsden), dishonorably discharged from the Marines, is forced by circumstances to re-enter the world he’d tried to escape. Brian Dennehy plays a Philly cop who offers him a chance to avoid jail and protect his brother (Brad Renfro) and cousin (Giovanni Ribisi), who’s angling to control the local sin trade. The story largely revolves around this struggle for control and Marsden’s efforts to get his cousin’s rival on tape for the cops.
+ The brisk-moving
story has a couple of surprises and kept me interested. Renfro is effective as
Marsden’s loyal, simple brother, and Piper Perabo is all right as a childhood
friend with whom Marsden gets reacquainted.
- This was the
follow-up to Crash for its co-writer, Bobby Moresco, who makes his
directorial debut here. But if Crash arguably suffered from an excess of
self-importance, this could use some of that Oscar-winning film’s heft. Once
the plot has placed the main character back on the street, Moresco mostly
forgets about what made him want to escape that lifestyle. You expect the
flashback scenes to explain some of this, but they really don’t. The film hits
all the usual mob film touchstones—there’s misguided loyalty, there’s a
trigger-happy nut (Ribisi), there a big showdown, and so forth. But it never
coalesces into something richer like Goodfellas or The Godfather.
Leslie Ann Warren’s character, the mother/aunt of the principals, is mostly
superfluous. And if you’re going to have PT Transit buses obviously visible and
have pivotal scenes take place at Wholey’s seafood market in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, why not just set the film there? The movie has the feel of being set
in a somewhat smaller city, anyway. Watching this, I had the idea that the
whole Philadelphia mob consisted of about half a dozen guys. (It’d be nice if
that were true.)
= **3/4 If you’ve
seen other mob movies, there’s nothing you haven’t seen before. But if you like
mob movies, the lack of originality might not bother you.
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