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Alpha Dog

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Trailer for "Alpha Dog"

Nick Cassavetes’ film based on the case of Jesse James Hollywood, a small-time suburban Los Angeles drug dealer who spent a few years on the FBI’s most wanted list, spends much of its running time daring you to watch it, a dare I was loath to ignore. Before settling into the meat of the story (in which Hollywood’s crew kidnapped and murdered the teenaged brother of a rival), Cassavetes spends a lot of time setting up the milieu surrounding these kids. Though they’re mostly in their 20s, “kids” is the only appropriate term of them: white youth of middle-class upbringing, morally and emotionally unformed, modeling themselves after gangsta gap videos. I presume that Cassavetes’ intention was to take an objective, nonjudgmental look at their behavior; everything about them, from their gratingly incessant profanity to the way they treat each other, is irredeemably obnoxious. But what he could have established in a few scenes while moving the plot forward, Cassavetes instead wallows in for nearly an hour. And while he may argue that he’s not celebrating this lifestyle, it won’t look that way to the kids who have every line of dialogue in Oliver Stone’s Scarface committed to memory. The second half of this overlong effort works up some dramatic gravitas, and along the way there are good performances by Justin Timberlake and Ben Foster (who should be first in line to play Renfield the next time Hollywood wants to remake Dracula). But there is much more wrong than right in this poorly conceived film that seems to have no point other than Cassavetes making a film as different as possible from his last effort, the sentimental hit The Notebook.