Deuces Wild - Wild in den Straßen

Ok, it's a rumble movie. It's like LORDS OF FLATBUSH with half the soul. It's WEST SIDE STORY without the song and dance. It's THE OUTSIDERS without the literary writing.

Sure, it's got a boatload of talented young faces, some already established, most semi-established when this released. But the script? Ugh. It's juvenile, simplistic, one-dimensional, mindlessly violent (though not graphic); something lifted from a 1960 "JD" message flick, but with better production values, including color.

I gave it a six out of pity and because I like Stephen Dorff, but it deserves a five. And Brad Renfro? How did so many filmmakers see potential in HIM before he died not long after this?

Bottomline: this is not an awful movie. It's not painful to watch. But it's a youth film that belongs in the 80s, not in 2003. And it doesn't deserve the actors it cast. From the list of actors, I'd guess this was a hot property when it was getting assembled, but subsequently, the writers and director let half the air out of its balloon and repackaged GREASE. Oh, and Norman Reedus? A disheartening case of one-note-johnny overacting in this particular effort.

I gotta suspect that the director let the cast down with mediocre, uninspired directions to the actors.

I liked this movie, it was very unrelenting and dark - The fight scenes are pretty intense especially the last one. A good story about an exploding gang rivalry, there are good performances from Fairuza Balk, Brad Renfro, Drea DeMatteo and others but the two actors from the Blade series really stood out here. I'm talkin' about Stephen Dorff(Blade, Judgment Night) and Norman Reedus(Blade 2, Boondock Saints), they were great in the rival roles of Leon and Marco, they really brought their hatred for each other to life, good job...

Anyone who has seen The Outsiders, Goodfellas, A Bronx Tale or Last Man Standing doesn't really need to watch this film because you've already seen it. The line up here includes a very promising cast of Steven Dourff as Leon, Brad Renfro as Bobby, Matt Dillon as Fritzy, Frankie Muniz as Scooch and Johnny Knoxville as Vince. But with all those characters comes very little character developementand leaves us with a full cast of characters that we don't care about with the small exception of Leon. We start the film with the death of Leon's brother and the imprisonment of Marko, the rival gang leader who gave his brother the drugs that killed him. Fast forward three years, Marko is out of jail and all hell is breaking loose on Leon's once peaceful block, Marko is also making a deal with Fritzy (the head of the block) to get his drugs back on the street and Leon's brother Bobby is becoming involved with the sister of a Viper. This film has everything, the rival gangs (Outsiders), the big show downs (Last Man Standing), the gangster who is in charge of everything (Bronx Tale) and the drug dealing (Goodfellas). But because of this the flim is robbed of any sort of self identity and becomes rather bogged down and boring, leading up to a conclusion that is inevidable because we have all seen it a hundred times before, just better. This film could have been a masterpeice were it put into the proper hands, but Scott Calvert is no Martin Scorsese and Matt Dillon is no Robert De Niro, so we are left satisfied to some extent, but still feel robbed of something. The lackluster direction and enormously cliched script don't help matters any. It's clear director Scott Calvert tried his hardest to be clever but his annoying camera tricks don't suit this movie well at all, in fact some of them are, at time, very hard to watch. The fight scenes are plentiful but lack any excitement due to the horrible choreograhpy and again cheesy camera movement making it hard to tell who is who. Matt Dillon show plenty of promise but is only given four scenes in the whole movie, Johnny Knoxville is a nobody that serves no importance and is hardly noticable and Frankie Muniz hardly mutters a word the whole time. I have always found Steven Dourff to have possessed a certain degree of talent but he has yet to be given a role where he can break free and show us what he is really made of, but he is still, by far, the highlight of the film. Now don't get me wrong, the movie is not a total waste and there are probably lots of people that this sort of thing will appeal to but its lack of originality cancels out any power of emotion and even though we have a cast of characters that I really didn't care about except for Leon, it's an hour and a half of my life that I don't regret.

Deuces Wild has gotten a lot of unfavourable comments by viewers and critics. I didn't think it was such a bad movie, especially considering the budget the producers and director had to work with. With the limited funds to make this film, the scenes were filmed with very few takes - giving it a 'play' feel.

The story reminds me of "The Outsiders" and "West Side Story" - which I found to be one of the down sides of the movie, but I still liked it overall.

Stephen Dorff gives a great performance as Leon, the Deuces leader. Supporting actor Mr. Renfro did not impress me however. A couple of the actors from "The Sopranos" play supporting roles. Drea De Matteo looks awesome in this film.

Rating: 7 out of 10.

Only those nostalgic for nostalgia are likely to be very impressed by `Deuces Wild,' a film that seems somehow more attuned to the ‘50's-crazed 1970's – a time when popular culture was embracing backward-looking fare like `American Graffiti' and `Happy Days' – than to the era in which it is actually set. That happens to be Brooklyn in the summer of 1958, when the streets were overrun with denim- and leather-clad hoodlums who smoked cigarettes, drove cool cars, and strutted around looking for fights to protect or extend their seemingly God-given `turf.'

`Deuces Wild' feels like it is about 25 years out of date, especially since it adds nothing new to a well-worn genre that can pinpoint its beginnings as far back as 1961's magnificent `West Side Story.' In fact, this is little more than `West Side Story' sans the music and dancing. Although the Jets and the Sharks have been replaced by the Deuces and the Vipers, we still have all the other elements from that earlier, better film: the challenges, the rumbles, the ineffectual and almost nonexistent parents, even a pair of lovers from opposite gangs caught in the inter-neighborhood warfare. The boys are utterly interchangeable and indistinguishable from one another, the dysfunctional parents beyond belief (one mother is so far gone mentally that she celebrates Christmas all year round and even believes in the existence of Santa Claus), and the action so pretentiously filmed that half of the dramatic scenes come replete with studio-generated thunder and lightning designed to lend tragic `significance' to what is, essentially, pretty silly, garden-variety hooliganism. The closing rumble scene is so confusingly shot and edited that it takes the voiceover narration to straighten out for us who got killed and who didn't.

The cast of mostly youthful actors does its best with shallow, stereotypical roles, but one should at least pity poor Frankie Muniz, that charming young star of TV's `Malcolm in the Middle,' who delivers a surprisingly dorky performance in the extremely sketchy and underwritten part of Scooch, the neighborhood `good kid' whom Leon, the Deuces' leader, takes under his wing. Hopefully, Muniz' film career will get better from here on out.

About the best one can say for `Deuces Wild' is that it is one hell of a good-looking film, thanks to John A. Alonzo's rich cinematography, which enhances the film's fine period décor. A pity that little else about the film merits similar commendation.