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80In his best film to date, Nick Cassavetes directs with ferocious energy, taking scenes past their logical stopping points and pushing his actors (particularly Foster, who can be as terrifying as Edward Norton in "American History X") to, but never over, the precipice of absurdity.
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75Around the midpoint Alpha Dog becomes less sociological and more personal, developing a real sense of suspense.
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75Cassavetes' instincts are spot-on, particularly when it comes to casting Timberlake in what turns out to be the most important role in the film. He manages to be both reprehensible and deeply charismatic, and winds up stealing the picture.
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75Don't be fooled by the presence of some pretty-boy actors: Alpha Dog is a gritty, gut-wrenching and disturbing film.
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75Alpha Dog isn't a happy movie, but it's dramatically solid and the impressions it leaves will not be easily shaken.
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75Like "Rebel", directed by Nicholas Ray, this film excels at capturing the nervous posturing of adolescent boys marking their territory by pissing on each other's shoes.
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If nothing else, Alpha Dog's worth a look for the performance of Justin Timberlake, the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience. Already a gifted comic actor--his Saturday Night Live appearances are now anticipated events--he proves himself able to go to a pitch-black place.
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70The movie suffers from an uncertain structure, but it boasts an extraordinary naturalism, not particularly flattering. Sharon Stone has a brilliant, harsh turn as Zack's mom, and both Bruce Willis and Harry Dean Stanton have good turns as the elder generations of Trueloves. But the movie belongs to its youngsters, and it's a real eye-opener.
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67Alpha Dog may well go down as the most dispiriting film of 2007.
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63Justin Timberlake shows that he can do more as an actor than just take his shirt off - though he does that a lot as well - in the irresponsible, uncommercial but surprisingly watchable Alpha Dog.
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63There's more voyeurism going on here, and less insight into a certain culture (the young and the wasted), than the filmmakers would probably admit to, but the performances are scarily real, and the outcome, well, is just scary.
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63At its best though, the film offers a pointed critique of a youth culture that views someone like Jesse James Hollywood as a person to emulate.
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60Your enjoyment of Alpha Dog may very well depend on how put off you are by these facts, as well as how much you buy Timberlake in his role, and how in the mood you are to sit through "River's Edge" set in the "Entourage" universe.
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60It suffers from ADD, but there's some terrific stuff in here. Leaving 15 minutes from the end and saving yourself a lumbering coda may improve enjoyment.
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60Writer-director Nick Cassavetes' sprawling dramatization recklessly blurs the line between reconstruction and reality in ways that are admittedly interesting, if more than a little artistically suspect.
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58Had the film been more tempered in its textures, had Cassavetes chosen a surer attitude toward his subjects, it might have been devastating. As it stands, though, it's far more showy than substantial.
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58For all of the credibility of the performances (or at least the teens), it all feels like recycled social commentary.
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50Timberlake walks off with the movie. Too bad it's not worth stealing.
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50It's another portrait of amoral, hedonistic youth gone awry, a la Larry Clark's "Bully", and it is alternately engrossing and ridiculous, often in the span of one scene to the next.
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50Who would have thought that a real-life tale of sex, drugs and murder could be so instantly forgettable?
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50The whole thing is dizzying, like "Moulin Rouge" without songs and dances extolling love.
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50As it escalates to a nasty conclusion, Alpha Dog doesn't have the moral or emotional weight of tragedy. These aren't the psychologically exploded youths of "Rebel Without a Cause," or even "The Outsiders." They're characters in a long, violent, unbleeped episode of MTV's "Cribs."
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50Cassavetes throws in everything he can recycle to grab a core-demo viewer -- slutty teens making out, blaring rock music, guns, split screens.
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50The cretins rule in Alpha Dog, which has much the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo or reading the latest issue of Star magazine. Of course a little of that nasty stuff may land on you, but such are the perils of voyeurism.
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50Apart from the grim forebodings of tragedy, writer-director Nick Cassavetes seems to have modeled this ambitious docudrama on Larry Clark's kiddie-porn shockers, but he doesn't know what to leave out, and the movie becomes excessively complicated with ancillary agendas.
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50All the bright colors Cassavetes splashes on the canvas don't make Alpha Dog art.
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40It's a soggy drama said to be inspired by actual events – too serious to be trashy, too trashy to be serious.
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40In this mess of a picture, Timberlake may be the rookie actor, but he's also the one to watch, the movie's North Star. The rest may as well be pinholes in a box.
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40In a film with several over-the-top characters bordering on camp, Timberlake's Frankie is the only one who approaches three dimensions, adept at convincingly dishing out some of the movie's disturbing violence as well as registering subtle shifts in Frankie's allegiance.
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25Its main feature is incessant, unimaginative profanity...Take out the cursing, and you're left with a plebeian drama about angry, aimless potheads, sloppily directed by the man who wrote it.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 18 out of 32
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Mixed: 2 out of 32
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Negative: 12 out of 32
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