Alpha Dog: Critic Reviews

Cassavetes (The Notebook) throws in everything he can recycle to grab a core-demo viewer -- slutty teens making out, blaring rock music, guns, split screens.

Alpha Dog has much the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo or reading the latest issue of Star magazine.

Overall though, it's a messy, superficial affair: it lacks focus, shifts uneasily in tone, and shoehorns in star names (Sharon Stone, Bruce Willis) to little effect.

Alpha Dog is almost a sociological study of a youthful culture awash in freedom and steeped in violence, drugs, casual sex and offensive language. It also shines a light on parents who have abdicated their positions of guidance and discipline.

The movie suffers from an uncertain structure, but it boasts an extraordinary naturalism, not particularly flattering.

These aren't the psychologically exploded youths of Rebel Without a Cause, or even The Outsiders. They're characters in a long, violent, unbleeped episode of MTV's Cribs.

If nothing else, Alpha Dog's worth a look for the performance of Justin Timberlake, the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience.

Director Nick Cassavetes has a blast with scenes of testosterone-fueled aggression (until it's time to repent), working the subwoofer in a way that'll surely boost DVD sales among boys with bedroom posters of Tony Montana.

Who would have thought that a real-life tale of sex, drugs and murder could be so instantly forgettable?

Recovering from the Harlequin bathos of The Notebook, writer-director Nick Cassavetes directs this bogus-homeboy scenario as though his street cred depended on it.

I truly doubt Hollywood will produce anything this year that bottoms Alpha Dog for offensively bad filmmaking.

The movie's biggest surprise is Timberlake, who finds the heart and soul of the not-so-tough Frankie and makes him the film's most complete character.

'This'll be over by tomorrow,' the big dog says to his prey at one point. Alpha Dog is full of good actors, young and old, making the most of such deceptively simple lines.

Apart from the grim forebodings of tragedy, writer-director Nick Cassavetes seems to have modeled this ambitious docudrama on Larry Clark's kiddie-porn shockers, but he doesn't know what to leave out, and the movie becomes excessively complicated.

There's more voyeurism going on here, and less insight into a certain culture (the young and the wasted), than the filmmakers would probably admit to, but the performances are scarily real, and the outcome, well, is just scary.

Rather than turn the camera away when disaster strikes, [director Cassavetes] keeps his suffering characters in close, uninterrupted focus, pushing us squarely into their pain.

Disturbing and energizing at the same time, Alpha Dog channels a flood of young talent through a story of foggy intentions, bad decisions and righteous partying that works because it feels (and is) so dangerously real.

Among the many movies about the California drug scene and lowlife, youthful wannabe thugs, Alpha Dog is far from the leader of the pack.

Alpha Dog is standard-issue tabloid fare pimped out as a serious true-crime saga.

Irresponsible, uncommercial but surprisingly watchable.

[Writer/director Cassavetes] never masters the tone and lands as many unintentional laughs as intentional ones. But he still manages, on occasion, to chill you to the bone.

Cassavetes starts to lose the plot at the precise moment he starts keeping exact track of it.

Alpha Dog is a commanding ensemble piece.

Cassavetes -- a sometime actor himself -- doesn't seem to understand actors at all. From the finished product, it looks as if his preferred method of guiding his actors is to egg them on rather than nudge them toward restraint.

Director Nick Cassavetes should be commended for the unflinching manner in which he tells the story -- it packs a punch, although it lingers too long to be truly unsettling.