A Violent Film that I Hated

I have seen many fucked up movies (pardon my French, but I couldn't think of a more polite-yet-effective word). Movies that have gratuitous violence, lots of gore, bucket-fuls of blood - hell, I even enjoy exploitation movies most of the times. But, I hate it when the entire movie tries to do everything it can, building up gradually through every single scene, for that one final scene of gut-wrenching violence, only to make people sorry for the victim. I hate, as I had said about Saawariya in a different context, movies where the manipulation shows. You might feel what the director wants you to feel probably, but you also feel, for want of a better word, dirty.

I hadn't seen Alpha Dog for a long time, because I don't think very highly of the director (Nick Cassavetes). He actually reminds me a bit of Bhansali in that he does not know when to stop. And he does not even have the aesthetic sense of the latter. The plot line didn't seem very ineteresting either. And the one criterion that might have made me ineterested was also not fulfilled - I couldn't find an Ebert review of the movie. But at a recent quiz I got to know that it has one of the highest number of 'fuck's uttered, much in the same league as Scarface or Goodfellas. I thought it can't be that bad in that case. We all love to hear profanities, don't we?

And I didn't hate the movie all that much either. It could have been made into a much better film by so many other directors. I think I missed a conversation early on because of my habit of chatting with people while watching a non-engaging movie and I got an inkling of what was going to happen quite late. I knew that the movie is about the youngest person to be on the America's Most Wanted FBI list, so it had some relation to reality. And so when the thing happened, I was saddened by it. But that was because of the horror of the incident itself, the fact that something like this could have happened this easily. Where I felt irritated was that the director had been showcasing the victim's innocence and goodness the whole way through. In fact the innocence of the victim and the perpetrators, through the very first sequence during the credits. That's lame. Respect the intelligence of your viewers. Don't read their stories out to them.

I am probably more pissed off because I hate it when a director does not know what his movie wants to be, and Alpha Dog is a bastardisation of way too many different divergent styles.

Having cribbed so much though, I would still recommend this movie, because some of the actors still end up doing a nice job and salvaging the movie. And I am sure the incident would pay off for a lot of people. Someone should give Sharon Stone better roles though. I hated her in this.