ALPHA DOG

By
Shannon Onstot
Community Relations Manager
KUNV 91.5 FM
University of Nevada Las Vegas
email: smonstot@yahoo.com


 

 

Despite my best efforts, I just couldn’t hate Alpha Dog. I walked in thinking that yet another movie was going to glamorize the world of drug dealing and organized crime among youth, and that’s what the film did, but at least it did it well.

Alpha Dog is based on the true story of Jesse James Hollywood (although oddly enough, I don’t remember ever seeing that in the opening credits) and Emile Hirsch plays the main character, Johnny Truelove. Although Hirsch is one of my favorite young actors, I was unimpressed by him in this film, and it wasn’t just because he played a scumbag. Hirsch lacked passion and emotion, and just wasn’t convincing overall. His character is a drug dealer who decides on a whim to hold a 15-year-old boy hostage because his older brother, Jake Mazursky (played by Ben Foster), owes Johnny money.

Ben Foster was fantastic in this film. He played a high-strung, drugged-up nutcase, and totally convinced me. I was pretty shocked when his character goes so far as to punch a woman in the face at one point, but it was easy to understand how much rage he experiences over the kidnapping of his brother. He was the standout performance from this film, and there were some other good performances, but for the most part they were mediocre at best.

The language is bad, but that’s to be expected, how else are teenage gangsters supposed to talk? There was a standard amount of topless females too, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the nudity was almost tastefully done. Almost. I don’t know the film was based on a true story, so I couldn’t tell what had been embellished and what truly happened, so it’s hard to make judgments on the writing if it’s based on real events I know nothing about.

The strongest point of this film is all the effects used to make it like a highly stylized crime documentary. The main characters’ parents are interviewed by a reporter a few years after all the kidnapping takes place, and the frame is split and different camera angles are taken in each frame. I thought this style was very effective, and I really enjoyed some of the cinematography. While Sharon Stone’s character has a melodramatic breakdown in a poorly made fat suit, the camera stays close, and the extreme close up is used pretty effectively (even if the scene itself was ridiculous). It drew the audience in, and made them face the atrocity of what happened. I found I couldn’t look away no matter how badly I wanted to most of the time. I would go so far as to call it gripping.

The trailers for this film depicted it as a fast paced thriller, but in actuality, I found the plot slow and methodical. Normally that would annoy me, but the slowness was a nice juxtaposition to the horrible events taking place throughout the film. Overall, I was affected by the story, and I honestly felt for a lot of the characters no matter how screwed up they were.