Imperium - Zwei Welten prallen aufeinander

A little gem of a gangster film. Not totally original, it could be seen as a homage to many of its predecessors, yet it delivers and keeps you interested right until the very end.

John Leguizamo plays local drug dealer Victor Rosa who sees the opportunity yo "branch out" into other areas and let his drug money work for him in the stock market when he meets, through his girlfriend, a up and coming wall street executive. Problem is that he finds it harder and harder to move away from his dangerous life on the streets, and still ends up having to deal with his crew of trigger happy homeboys, rival drug dealers and drug kingpins - which turns out to be a hell of a lot harder than before.

Leguizamo is brilliant in the lead role and has good support from the likes of Peter Sarsgaard, as his new wall street chum, and Vincent Laresca as his best friend from childhood. Its also good to see old stagers Isabella Rossellini and Sonia Braga again.

Denise Richards (not really having to act here, which suits her fine) and unknown Delilah Cotto are good eye candy, and do well as the sexy female leads.

An A for effort to all involved.

"Empire" is all about a streetwise drug dealer (Leguizamo) in South Bronx, NY who self-narrates his take on how to work your way out of the ghetto and go legit. A slick shoot with a bunch of trite recycled street crime and gangland snippets pieced together for a screenplay, this predictable and contrived flick never really gets where it's trying to go. Chock full of plot holes and nonsequiturs, the auteur asks us to care enough about a thug, murderer, and drug pusher to sit through 1.5 hours of all-sizzle-but-no-steak nonsense about his life. A so-so no brainer action/drama for Leguizamo fans and crime buffs only. (C+)

A South Bronx drug dealer (Leguizamo) with an uncommon sense of honor and professionalism longs for a better life and thinks he has found his way into mainstream respectability when he meets slick and duplicitous Wall Street investment banker Jack Wimmer (Sarsgaard in an uncharacteristically one-dimensional performance). Things go well at first and he believes he has left his old life behind for good but then disaster strikes.

Written and directed by Franc Reyes this was a star vehicle for non-star John Leguizamo who also co-produced. Its pretensions are toward being a modern version of a 1930's Warner Brothers gangster picture with the Shakespearian rise and fall of a strong-willed character. Instead it falls flat with a preposterous premise and stereotypical shoot-em up elements.

This is a thoroughly amateurish production right down to the casting of the extras and one wonders why solid actors like Sarsgaard, Rosellini, Serrano and Braga would have let themselves get talked into doing something like this.

Reyes may have thought he was being clever by giving roles to people that aren't really actors but the result is a mess filled with awful performances that only picks up energy at the end (by which time most of the amateur actors' characters have been killed off).

Victor Rosa (John Leguizamo) is a drug dealer in the South Bronx. He's made a lot of money with his crew Jimmy, Chedda, and Jay. He calls his area and his product Empire. He gets into a feud with a neighboring rival. His girlfriend Carmen goes to college with Trish (Denise Richards) who introduces them to her Wall Street banker boyfriend Jack (Peter Sarsgaard). Jack offers Victor an investment opportunity which requires him to get a loan from his drug source La Colombiana (Isabella Rossellini).

Leguizamo is trying to be hard and he's trying too hard. The narration tries to be hard-boiled. There is a lot of trying but a lot less succeeding. Writer/director Franc. Reyes is trying to mimic better gangster movies. There are ways to make this work but Reyes doesn't have it at this point.

Despite its poor box office performance and multitude of bad reviews from major critics, I found the movie to be quite good. John Leguizamo gives a powerful performance, exhibiting that same dramatic power he did in Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam." This is writer/director Franc Reyes' first film, and it's no masterpiece, but he definitely shows signs of talent. Not to mention the film was made on a low budget, yet it's just as effective, if not more, than urban gangster movies twice its budget. The film is flashy, but not too flashy. There is one shot, inspired by John Woo, in which Fat Joe flips a shotgun up in the air and it's played in slow-motion. Moments like that have their charm, "moment" being the key word. Too many scenes like that and you've got yourself the stereotypical, hare-brained, MTV music video disguising as a motion picture ala "Charlie's Angels." Reyes used an interesting lighting technique, making the ghetto scenes appear more golden and the uptown scenes a darker, blue-ish color. In most movies of this type, the ghetto scenes would be much more darkly lit, but Reyes wanted to break from the mold.

The story is predictable, except for one moment at the very end, but at the same time it's inspired and realistic. There are a few contrived, you-asked-for-it moments like Leguizamo's girlfriend catching him cheating on her with Denise Richards, but I didn't make a big fuss out of them. Reyes himself grew up in the South Bronx, so some of the scenes and characters are inspired from his childhood, and that inspiration really shows. Also, I always condone films with predominantly Latin-American casts, whether they're good or bad, because Hispanics are still very much snubbed in the world of media. So this is a film from a real Latin-American perspective, and not the perspective of a white man who did some research on their barrios and starring white actors with cheesy Latin accents (i.e.: Al Pacino in "Scarface").

Even though I'm all for minorities getting their art out there, that doesn't mean they have to diss the majorities. What I wasn't too thrilled about was the way the white characters were written. They're portrayed as the usual stuck-up, Armani-wearing fools they are in most films with a cast predominantly consisting of minorities. The climax involves the Peter Skarsgard character yelling out a racial slur. That seemed like a cheap device to elicit huge reactions from the young Hispanics in the audience. And the Denise Richards character is a ditsy floozie. What else is new? However, I've seen worse Caucasian stereotypes in African-American films. At least in this case, the whites weren't complete objects of ridicule.

The only member of the cast who I felt was out of place was Isabella Rossellini, who for some reason just seems like she walked onto the wrong movie set and never seems comfortable with her role. But the rest of the cast is superb. God knows I don't condone rappers venturing into acting, as a general rule, but the rappers who are in the film (Fat Joe and Treach from Naughty By Nature) are effective in their small roles, the key word being "small." If they had more major roles, my opinion would probably be a lot more negative.

"Empire" is a good, solid, well-acted, entertaining, action-packed joyride with great elements of truth. In a way, it's like an inner-city film noir.

My score: 7 (out of 10)