Here is a movie that wants to shock and disturb us. And it certainly does, but not for anything that happens on screen. Alpha Dog takes the possibly interesting true crime story of Jesse James Hollywood, the youngest man ever to be featured on the F.B.I.'s Most Wanted List, and turns it into an aimless, meandering, and plotless mess of a spectacle. Writer-director Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) wants to tell a story of overly privileged California teens who do terrible things to themselves and each other. The problem here is that he spends all of his time on the lifestyle, and no time whatsoever on story and character development. Instead of shocking us with the story, the only thing that ends up shocking is how anyone could have taken such strong material, and turned it into such a boring chore to sit through.

Since the real life criminal is currently awaiting trial, the filmmakers were forced to change the name of Jesse James Hollywood to Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch from Lords of Dogtown). At the age of only 18, Johnny has already become a notorious drug dealer, and is living the high life in his luxurious California home. Trouble arises when one of his friends, Jake Mazursky (Ben Foster from X-Men III) can't come up with the money he owes Johnny. A violent personal war begins to brew between the two, which leads to Johnny kidnaping Jake's 15-year-old younger brother Zack (Anton Yelchin) when he sees the kid walking down the street alone while driving in his van with his two friends, Frankie (Justin Timberlake) and Tiko (Fernando Vargas). It turns out that Zack had run away from home after an argument with his parents (David Thornton and Sharon Stone), and finds the fast-living, drug-fueled, sex-charged lifestyle of Johnny and his friends more to his liking than the pampered suburban existence that he's used to. While Zack is enjoying his "kidnaping", Johnny is becoming increasingly fearful, especially since he could be facing life in prison if this situation blows up in his face. As Johnny becomes more desperate for a way out, he begins to consider just about every option, even murder.

Having sat on the studio's shelf for well over a year, Alpha Dog has all the markings of a movie that wasn't ready to be released. The storyline is practically non-existent, the characters are stiff and wooden, and the dialogue is an unmemorable and sometimes laughably bad string of obscenities where the actors use the F-word so much, you'd think they were being paid extra each time they slipped it into their dialogue. For a movie based on a true story, it tells us absolutely nothing about the people involved. We learn absolutely nothing about "Johnny", and how he became such a powerful drug dealer at such a young age. We learn nothing about his friends, or why they respect him or even why they put up with his verbal and physical abuse that he displays numerous times. We learn nothing about young Zack, and why he seemed so drawn to the life of his older brother. The movie instead wastes most of its running time on an endless series of drug parties, sex binges, and the actors sitting around, acting stoned, and screaming obscenities at each other. The movie never goes anywhere interesting, and when it seems to finally be going somewhere, it goes right back to where it was before. The characters are a faceless sea of people who wander in and out of the movie at random. For some reason, the film decides to inform us when a person who will be used as a witness in the trial happens to walk into the movie by displaying a subtitle underneath them. This ultimately proves to be pointless, as the trial itself plays absolutely no part whatsoever in the movie itself, nor will any of these "witnesses" ever be seen again. So, what was the point? We're left to simply sit around, waiting for something to happen, and it never does. Surprisingly, the film decided it should rob two hours of your life telling no story whatsoever. Just about any respectable filmmaker could have used those hours to make a very interesting movie out of this material. Cassavetes wastes no opportunity to screw it up.

The movie tries to take our mind off the fact that there's nothing going on up there on the screen with a lot of needless flash and fancy edits, such as split screen and a number of "documentary" sequences where the actors sit and talk to an off camera filmmaker, talking about the events of Johnny's life. These sequences are extremely pointless, as not only do they senselessly cut into the narrative, but they give us no additional information on the characters or the roles they play. A good example is Johnny's father, Sonny, who supposedly supplied his son's drug business and even helped him avoid the police for a while when things turned bad. For playing a somewhat large role in the story, Sonny barely even registers as a player in the overall plot of the film. Yet, for some reason, a majority of the interview sequences are focused on him. This is most likely because Sonny is played in this film by Bruce Willis, and if it were not for these sequences, he'd have maybe five minutes of screentime in the entire film. A later sequence where they "interview" Sharon Stone as Zack's mother is almost laughable, thanks to the unconvincing fat suit and make up that she is forced to wear to show how her character has changed since the events of the story. I must ask why these sequences are even here, since the movie is not the least bit interested in its characters. They only pad out the running time, and fool us into thinking there's a point to all this. Then again, I question whether these characters would be worth our attention, since a lot of them seem incredibly stupid. Not only does the reasoning of what to do with Zack seem more than a little off, but Johnny and his friends don't seem to have a single clue in the world, which is odd considering that these guys are supposed to be powerful criminals. Perhaps in the end, Alpha Dog is doing us a service by keeping us at a distance from these characters, as nobody who walks into this movie looked like someone I'd want to spend two hours hearing about.

The performances that tell this undernourished morality tale are a mixed bag from the passable to the downright scene-chewingly comical. Former boy band member, Justin Timberlake, comes across the best, as he is actually able to have some emotional scenes with young Zack as the two build somewhat of a friendship together. It's a shame the movie does not go deeper into their relationship, or into the dilemma he faces near the end, as he's the only one who gets a chance to create something of a real character. As the notorious Johnny Truelove, Emile Hirsch barely even registers. Yeah, he looks appropriately slimy and hateful, but there is nothing really there to his performance. In the scene-chewingly comical category, the lead candidate is Ben Foster as Zack's meth-addicted older brother. He screams and rants and raves through most of his dialogue, but never really plays any real role. The fact that his character completely disappears half-way through the movie doesn't help matters. The rest of the cast is mainly an interchangeable sea of unrecognizable faces, and that includes young Anton Yelchin as Zack, which is too bad as it really hurts the poignant mood that his final scene tries so hard to achieve. The adult co-stars such as Bruce Willis, Sharon Stone and Harry Dean Stanton as a dirty-minded old man who hangs out with Sonny are mere cameos, and barely have time to leave anything resembling an impression, let alone create a real performance.
Alpha Dog is just terrible filmmaking all around. It takes a workable idea, and then decides to waste every minute it has to spend talking about it. Although it's competently made, you get the feeling that you're looking at a lot of well-made nothing. No emotions are stirred, no feelings are brought forth, nothing is said, and in the end, we all feel like we've wasted our time. Everyone obviously made an effort, but that's hard to commend when the final result winds up being so little. Alpha Dog left me feeling empty and sad. Not because of what happens to the characters, but because I saw a lot of wasted potential. Life is too short for movies that give us nothing, and that's exactly what this film has to offer.

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