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BROOKLYN RULES
Directed by: Michael Corrente.
Produced by: Corrente, Marisa Polvino & Richard Barton Lewis.
Written by: Terence Winter.
Director of Photography: Richard Crudo.
Edited by: Kate Sanford.
Music by: Benny Rietveld.
Released by: City Lights Pictures.
Country of Origin: USA. 99 min. Rated R. With: Freddie Prinze Jr., Scott Caan, Jerry Ferrara, Mena Suvari, Christian Maelen, Robert Turano & Alec Baldwin.

Brooklyn Rules lays on the gangster material very early on, opening in the ‘70s with three young boys coming across a reputed mobster (Alec Baldwin) beating up a man on the street. The same three boyhood friends also find a car with a dead body in it out in a wooded area. Then the story cuts right away to the mid-‘80s, when all three are now grown up, more or less: Michael (Freddie Prinze Jr.), the one who wants to get out of the blue-collar neighborhood and become a lawyer; the vain Carmine (Scott Caan), a minor hood under the tutelage of Caesar Manganaro (Alec Baldwin); and Bobby (Jerry Ferrara), the lowest common denominator, a sweet boy living with his parents who may or may not get the job as a post office clerk.

The episodic tale is lead along by Michael’s always informative (maybe too much so) narration, with some moments of stark violence, one in particular involving a meat slicer, and of stupidity, like a diner fight with Michael and a crazy hood. Screenwriter Terence Winter, who’s probably best known for being a chief writer on The Sopranos, does and doesn’t provide enough to really raise the material above its given Scorsesean tough-guy shenanigans with its allusions to Catholic guilt and twenty-something penance.

He, thankfully, uses his own Brooklyn roots to his advantage by giving the characters some authentic everyday banter. But Winter’s also all too reliant on the narration to explain everything. The audience doesn’t need to be told how to feel, for example, when someone loses a dog. It’s right there on the actors’ faces. Winter also depends too much on period details (every other scene has to pound it into the viewer’s head what year it is when the soundtrack would suffice on its own). And surprisingly for a writer of The Sopranos (though, come to think of it, he also helmed 50 Cent’s bomb Get Rich or Die Tryin’), the lead up to the harsh climax bringing the friends into a web of murder and vengeance is only marginally compelling. There’s little motivation other than revenge, with the consequences not fully explored.

Director Michael Corrente does his best to compensate – albeit somewhat treading familiar territory in the episodic structure of his comedy Outside Providence – with some concise camera movements. But he can’t pass by a cheesy montage of firing guns as a means to show, as the narration states, what happened when the crime families of Brooklyn and Queens went to war following a mob boss’s death. It’s a shame, because there are some elements to the characters that make it a tad unique in the lineage of contemporary New York City crime films, but they are just not explored enough, or convincingly enough, for a feature film. Jack Gattanella
May 18, 2007