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The website's critical consensus reads, 'Well-acted and beautifully filmed, Alpha offers a canine-assisted epic adventure that blends rousing action with an extra helping of canine charm. Instead of intensifying concern over the boy's fate, all these numerals are a distraction.Īs uneven as the film is, those with strong stomachs will find it worth sticking with. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Alpha holds an approval rating of 80 based on 133 reviews, with an average rating of 6.5/10. they look like golf start times) and gives each of the 30 or so people who encounter Zack with his abductors a witness number. To emphasize "Alpha Dog's" veracity, he flashes dates and times on the screen (9:06 a.m., 10:17 a.m. Stone also is extremely moving, proving again how hypnotic she can be, given proper direction.Ĭassavetes based his script on actual events in the late 1990s.
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Hirsch brings the right degree of bluster to Johnny, and Yelchin projects an innocence that will break your heart. It's a breakthrough performance on par with Edward Norton's in "Primal Fear." He never stands still, appearing at times to break into a jig. Timberlake plays him as a bundle of anxiety. A costume designer had an inspired idea to put him in a straw hat, so Frankie immediately stands out in the gang. The hugely popular singer shows that he can act with the same contagious energy he brings to his music. Overprotected, Zack sees the whole thing as a lark, a chance to spread his wings - which he does with two pretty groupies who make themselves sexually available. Like a gang that can't shoot straight, the young hoods haphazardly kidnap him as revenge without any sense of the enormity of what they've done. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Zack has just escaped out his bedroom window to avoid a fight with his adoring, but suffocating, mother (Sharon Stone). The whole thing is dizzying, like "Moulin Rouge" without songs and dances extolling love.Īlthough the mafioso family is given the surname Truelove - scion Johnny (Emile Hirsch) is a chip off the old block - there's little love in the deeply disturbing, and often gratuitously violent, "Alpha Dog." But once it finally comes into focus, Cassavetes builds up a gut-wrenching suspense likely to keep you on the rim of your seat.ĭriving through a well-to-do neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley - in cruel morning light, it appears as a vast wasteland - Johnny and his minions spot the 15-year-old half brother, Zack (Anton Yelchin), of a double-crosser named Jake (Ben Foster) who reneged on a loan and, as a further sign of his contempt, defecated on Johnny's carpet. It takes far longer than necessary to establish who the main characters are and what their relationships are to one another. Soon afterward, a group of teenage troublemakers are at a club standing under a music video projected larger than life, so you don't know where you're meant to be looking. Writer-director Nick Cassavetes crowds the screen with a confusing number of images, beginning with Bruce Willis - as the Mafia-connected father of a small-time drug dealer - being interviewed for a documentary that serves as a film within the film. Like a puppy brought outdoors after being cooped up inside, "Alpha Dog" takes a while to settle down.