Lords of Dogtown: Critic Reviews

Hardwicke is the rare director whose work is at once kinesthetic and delicate.

Lords of Dogtown, from start to finish, is pretty much a blast.

It's hard to think of a movie since 1950's Sunset Boulevard that has gotten more dramatic impact out of a pool.

Lords of Dogtown isn't a cop-out, but rather an ever-so-slight concession to commercialism, while Dogtown and Z-Boys was, above all else, a love song to the counterculture.

If watching Dogtown and Z-Boys was tantamount to witnessing history itself, watching Lords of Dogtown, which Peralta wrote, feels more like watching a stiff, meticulously choreographed reenactment.

The movie is like a daydream, and it's most infectious when the characters are in motion or misbehaving, which is often.

Leaner and sharper than its fast-and-furious TV spots would let on.

Peralta's script is hackneyed, Hardwicke's direction is flat, the cinematography is boring, the acting is atrocious, and the film's depictions of the '70s surfer/skateboarding culture at L.A.'s Venice Beach is scandalously cliched.

When the film works dramatically, it works because of [Emile Hirsch and Heath Ledger].

Lords can't quite sustain this adrenaline to the finish as it eventually loses focus and takes a fall into sentimentality. But when it excels, it brings that electric charge that comes when a film's style is perfectly matched with its subject.

Accomplished film.

Not only is there no need for this movie, but its weaknesses underline the strength of [Dogtown and the Z-Boys].

Stacy Peralta, this is your life. Again. And again.

The film doesn't hold together in any compelling way.

Peralta's script doesn't have a satisfying dramatic structure.

Lords of Dogtown rocks.

The young cast shines, especially Hirsch.

Superficial and disconcertingly conventional.

Peralta has actually told this tale once before, and done a better job, as the director of the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys.

Catherine Hardwicke, working from a Peralta script and stealing the look and verve of his earlier documentary, turns in a dazzling, edgy and entertainingly blunt riff on the gnarly and how they got that way.

For someone who was there, not to mention someone who created Dogtown and Z-Boys, Peralta has crafted a script so superficial and simplistic it feels like it was tapped out by a 14-year-old fan.

Lords of Dogtown is a fictional feature that tries hard to mimic the sun-baked realism of the documentary that inspired it. But mimic is all it does.

Lords of Dogtown stays afloat, largely because many of its actors transcend Hardwicke's heavy-handed storytelling.

Lords of Dogtown will have limited interest for those who exist outside of the skateboarding community.

The young performers supply the necessary physicality and charisma, with Hirsch particularly effective as the sensitive Adams.