Its glut of violence aside, 'Deuces Wild' still lays down a lousy hand

Friday, May 3, 2002

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

The first film in ages from the near-moribund United Artists Co., "Deuces Wild," is a juvenile delinquent gut-buster/1950s nostalgia movie that, in its best moments, resembles a bad high school production of "Grease," without benefit of song.

MOVIE REVIEW

DEUCES WILD

DIRECTOR: Scott Kalvert

CAST: Stephen Dorff, Brad Renfro,

Fairuza Balk

RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes

RATING: R for violence, language,

drug content and brief sex

WHERE: Alderwood 7, Cinema 17, Everett 9, Factoria, Galleria, Gateway 8, Issaquah 9, Meridian 16, Monroe 12, Parkway Plaza, Redmond Town Center, South Hill Mall, Woodinville 12

GRADE: D

The only thing that distinguishes it from the glut of abysmal made-for-video programmers is an unusually high supply of bone-crunching violence, which is no doubt why the studio figured it stood a chance to catch on with a theatrical audience.

It's the story of Leon (Stephen Dorff), a Fonzie-like leader of a 1958 Brooklyn street gang called the Deuces, who is strongly antidrug (one of his brothers died from an overdose) and an all-around good tough guy who only wants to protect his neighborhood.

But there's this real bad gang just across the street with no such lofty moral code that's been bringing in drugs by the barrel, conspiring with a big-time Mafioso (Matt Dillon, smart enough to remove his name from the credits) and ambushing the good JDs. So its rumble time.

Director Scott Kalvert seems to be after the dark visual style of Walter Hill's "The Warriors," but can't quite pull it off. His film looks both cheap and over-produced at the same time: as if Jerry Bruckheimer had staged a Monogram "Bowery Boys" movie.

The cast -- Dorff, Dillon, Brad Renfro, Fairuza Balk, Debbie Harry, Balthazar Getty, Max Perlich and especially Norman Reedus (as the vilest of the villains) -- all do their best but the movie around them slowly disintegrates into an ensemble shouting match of unconvincing Brooklyn accents.

Kalvert fills the movie with '50s cultural references -- the trauma of the Dodgers going West, Elvis in the Army, pigeon coops on the roof -- but they're thrown at us with such a heavy hand that it detracts from the verisimilitude and keeps reminding us the movie is a big phony.