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Based on his memoirs, first-time director Dito Montiel has the good intentions
of making a film in the mold of Mean Streets, but it’s an admirable and slight effort. If it isn’t completely a gritty,
no-holds-barred autobiography, it has a little to do with the direction and the lack of a driving story more than anything else.
In the present day, Dito (Robert Downey Jr.) is called back home from California to Queens to tend to his worried-sick mother (Diane Wiest) and dying
father, Monty (Chazz Palminteri). He also gets re-acquainted with an old flame, Laurie (Rosario Dawson), and is prodded to visit
an old friend, Antonio (Eric Roberts), who’s been put away in jail for a long time. Randomly in chronology, the director
sends us back to Queens 1986, when Dito was a teen running with his young friends, who have no ambition except to tear up the town
(particularly Antonio, the roughest of the lot). It’s not until the arrival of the new kid on the block, Mike (Martin Compton), that Dito realizes the possibility of life outside the hood. (Mike’s not just from outside the borough, he’s from outside the country – Scotland.)
The performances are not necessarily the problem. If anything, this is definitely an actor’s movie, and Montiel’s dialog,
particularly in the 1986 scenes, is believable and naturalistic to the point of sounding like a docudrama. Palminteri can play a guy
like Monty in his sleep, so to speak. As the quick-tempered, tough-guy father, it’s almost as if he’s now playing the flip side of
Robert De Niro’s role in
A Bronx Tale (which was written by Palminteri). He is a strong force in all of his scenes with both the young and old Dito.
Shia LaBeouf, as the 1986 Dito, seems, despite showing bits and pieces of toughness, like he’ll burst into tears in most scenes.
As the young ringleader Antonio, Channing Tatum’s focus as an actor is much stronger. He is pretty much the most bullheaded and
street-smart of the young teen characters, and his role maybe the most crucial for Dito, who wants Antonio’s respect even while he’s
acquiring a distaste for the neighborhood around him. In fact, a number of the scenes set in the past are compelling (and violent).
But it’s the random cutting back between 1986 and the present that becomes a distraction, not a revelation. Every time the director
cuts to the older Dito (the enervated Robert Downey Jr.) and Dawson and Wiest, the film loses its edge. Either sticking to one time frame or the other would’ve benefited this bio pic as a whole.
Jack Gattanella
September 29, 2006
