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Alpha Dog

While "Alpha Dog," starring Emile Hirsch, Anton Yelchin and Justin Timberlake, caused a big stir at Sundance. I felt the film didn’t quite live up to its hype.

Anton Yelchin was the shining light of the film, portraying a fifteen-year-old patsy in a plot that would inevitably lead to his death. He skillfully embodied a clueless, awestruck fifteen-year-old experimenting with drugs, alcohol and sex with only the supervision of his equally clueless peers. After following his naive exploration so closely, his death is especially poignant.

Ben Foster and Sharon Stone both gave impressive performances, although they departed drastically from the rest of the film’s tone. Foster undoubtedly had the acting chops to pull off his chilling role as a meth-addicted neo-Nazi skinhead. But the scene in which he uses choreographed martial arts and almost superhuman strength to overtake a party of people seems almost surreal next to scenes of Timberlake and his peers drinking alcohol and dancing. Likewise, Sharon Stone’s dramatic monologue upon her son’s death may have stood well alone, but after scenes of sophomoric debauchery comes off as a melodramatic rant.

And that’s the film’s fatal flaw. As it was based on real life it had no story pattern at its core. The film had an inciting incident (the argument over Jake Mazursky’s debt to Johnny Truelove) and an ending (Zack Mazursky’s death), but the middle ambled aimlessly from one party scene to another. Director Nick Cassavetes tried to give the film some form by posting the chronologies and witnesses of the case, but the final product resembles a high-budget dramatization rather than a true film.

It’s an adequate “day-in-the-life” tale of drunken/high teenagers who make bad choices and let things go too far, but you’ve gotten everything you can get from it after one viewing.

Written by: Katherine E. Webb

Reviewers Rating: 6.5
Reader's Rating: 7.00
Reader's Votes: 1

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