Alpha Dog [HD]

When the parents are away...
The movie is based on the true story of the kidnapping of Zack Mazursky (Yelchin) by "drug dealer" Johnny Truelove(Hirsch) and his "posse". The basics is that they kidnap the 15 year-old kid so that his older brother pays up the 1200 dollars he owes Truelove. But the whole plan goes awry and Zack ends up being killed.

In itself the movie isn't that original. It's themes we've already seen a million times : the disenchanted, bored youth who play drug dealers in California. But what makes this different is that it's a true story, and that fact alone turns the movie into a dark, almost horror, story that ends up haunting you and staying with you long after the end credits. This actually ends up saving the movie from itself, not turning it into another one of those horrible laugh-out-loud movies like "Havoc". What helps is also the opening credits, where when you reach the end you end up asking yourself "how did they get from there to here?"

The acting is...

THE MORE LIGHTHEADED IT LOOKS, THE SCARIER
Johnny Truelove (Hirsch) is pushing weed to local teenagers and everything seems to be fine in his quiet life till his authority is questioned by a fascist jew(!) Mazursky (Foster) who furthermore is not giving Johnny back $1200 he borrowed. Truelove and his friends then kidnap Mazursky's 15-year-old brother Zack (Yelchin) and hold him as a hostage. Zack is OK with being a hostage - parties, booze, weed and girls are definately better than sitting home with wonk parents. Everybody's having a great time, kids fool around and it seems like we observe ordinary teenagers' life, only sometimes captions appear at the sides of the screen calling every new character number next witness. And it makes you feel uneasy. We know the film is based on true events, hence we know something bad will happen, but till the very end I personally refused to believe it actually will.

Alpha Dog is a movie about a crime which was commited not by some malicious intent, but rather by an absolute...

Say Goodbye to Hollywood.
I stumbled across Alpha Dog the other night on cable and found myself wrapped up in the true life teen gangster story along the lines of Larry Clark's Bully, although lighter and funnier. Dog is filled with young acting talent reminiscent of The Outsiders - The Complete Novel (Two-Disc Special Edition) combined with strong seasoned performances by Sharon Stone, Bruce Willis, and Harry Dean Stanton.

Dog, directed by Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook (New Line Platinum Series)), who also played bad guy Packard Walsh in the so bad it's good 80's movie The Wraith. Amazon already does an informative write up, which talks about Cassavetes own run in with the law for his contact with the real life...

Click to Editorial Reviews