Rockaway

Rockaway straight to video was GREAT! Nicholas Gonzalez is Trane a battle proved war veteran from a tough tour in Afghanistan back home in Queens the neighborhood that took out his family becomes his center of rage. He becomes hell bent on taking out anyone involved in crime. Crook brothers turn it up with no slow boring parts. Oleg Taktarov sets things off as a "redfella" leading a Russian crime family. The action looked good as any movie. I could be talking crazy but Nicholas Gonzalez was way more better than hot shot actor from Harsh Times.

What it came down to me was how real the Crooks brothers kept it. They showed what Queens hard living is. Rent it or buy it you cant lose people.

The one & only really interesting thing about this movie is that the directors did not hold back even a little bit in showing graphic blood & gore. Other than that it was another movie driven forward by the ridiculous stupidity of all of its characters.

I saw this flick on a screening ready to be put on straight to video and i must say i was really surprised by this one , I'm no fan of straight to video movies,but sometimes one pops up as entertaining and this was surely on of those. with a budget of 2 million and at first a simple story i was really surprised by the events in this flick , the acting was so so but not as bad as i expected but the special effects compared to other straight to videos was surprisingly good and i actually grinned here and there.The baddies are stereotypes but that really fits for this one.So if your tired of the forever hero one man army righteous movies , try this one because this one has a bit of an edge to it.

"Rockaway" is not always an easy movie to watch. The brutality keeps coming, as the movie tells the story of a returning vet from Afghanistan who faces as much personal chaos in the States as he encountered at war. Nicholas Gonzalez plays Trane, the homecoming vet, whose wife and child were murdered in Rockaway when they got in the way of the local mob. The brutality is necessary, because the story (said to be truth based) can not take it easy on either the facts or its themes to be effective. Trane comes home to neighborhood warfare and economic desolation in an often overlooked pocket of America. One of his adversaries is a Russian mob enforcer played masterfully by Oleg Taktarov, depicting another Afghan vet who served in the Soviet Army. Taktarov's character Ivan is menacing, but the actor also makes him sympathetic as Ivan, like Trane, was psychologically and morally exhausted by war in the Middle East. Taktarov gets better with every role, and when he's on the screen, "Rockaway" delivers its messages with breathless impact.

I checked this movie out because I was a HUGE fan of the directors' horror film Salvage (if you have not seen Salvage, check it out, because it's one of the best low-budget horrors I've ever seen and just a good movie, period).

This film, though, just didn't have that same magic. The story follows a veteran who returns from war to discover his wife and baby murdered and his neighborhood under the control of ruthless drug dealers. Realizing the police are complicit, the veteran sets out to take revenge.

I guess that my problem with this film just comes down to tone. It tries to have serious moments and funny moments, and in between all of that there's not enough character development. The lead actor is fine (as are most of the actors), but most of the secondary characters are too thinly drawn. The main characters seem to have a lot of contempt for women, and the film itself often treats them as punchlines or sex objects. There's a "funny" conversation between two of the bad guys about how to hit a prostitute to punish her. So, okay, I'm supposed to care about violence towards the veteran's wife and sister, but laugh about the abuse of the prostitutes?

There is a decent stretch of plotting in the middle as the veteran infiltrates the drug organization and begins to play the different bad guys against each other. This was the strongest part of the film and had the best action. But the third act felt sloppy and even confusing. Without revealing any spoilers, I got to the last moments and I was like "What?".

If I hadn't had so much faith in these directors from their previous film, I probably would not have stuck with it. There were strengths to the film, but not enough to overcome the tonal inconsistency and disrespectful treatment of female characters.