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83Leguizamo owns Empire, the first film to capture the live-wire crackle of his one-man stage shows -- He's front and center in nearly every scene, and he holds the screen with a simmering self-assurance.
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80Reyes' fast-paced tale soars on the pedigree of its cast, all of whom are clearly having a ball -- Both poignant and wickedly amusing, Empire sets high standards for a subgenre that's rarely had any.
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80In regard to Franc. Reyes' engrossing and utterly uncompromising Empire let it be said right at the top that the protean John Leguizamo, last seen as Toulouse-Lautrec in "Moulin Rouge," gives one of the best performances of the year in a lead role in an American movie.
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75A gangster movie with the capacity to surprise. People do unexpected things and for reasons we wouldn't anticipate.
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63Comes so close to working that you can see there from here. It has the right approach and the right opening premise, but it lacks the zest and it goes for a plot twist instead of trusting the material.
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63Empire, with its double-barreled shoot-outs, its predictable carnage and conflict, and a rush-job of a resolution, is ultimately just one more urban gangland genre flick.
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60Empire is an entertaining, colorful, action-filled crime story with an intimate heart.
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60Choreographer-turned-filmmaker Franc. Reyes covers familiar ground without stumbling or dazzling.
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50While Reyes seeks his own ambitious style, he can't quite step out from under De Palma's shadow and thematic choices. Everything from the voiceover narration to the final frame in Empire looks and feels like a low-budget hybrid of "Scarface" or "Carlito's Way."
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50Panders to its audience by glorifying drug dealing and violence in all-too-depressingly familiar ways.
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50Stereotypical, banally written bloodbath.
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50Rossellini doesn't do much more than show up and be a hundred kinds of ravishing. Yet there's a movie in her ageless face and that untamed bouffant.
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50Like its protagonist, the movie tries to rise above convention, flails about a bit, and slides back into self-parody.
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40This tale has been told and retold; the races and rackets change, but the song remains the same.
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40Watching John Leguizamo labor to keep this leaky vessel afloat, I was reminded of all those Hell's Kitchen melodramas James Cagney rescued in the early 30s.
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38This is clearly the Worst Performance by an Actress in a Death Scene since Sofia Coppola took a bullet for her dad in "The Godfather: Part III."
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38Empire is just too intent on living up to its imperial name -- colonizing other defenceless movies, plundering their rich natural resources, and leaving us all to feel rather cruelly violated. A postscript: Somebody here -- I'm not saying who -- dies. And still keeps on talking.
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38I know Empire is supposed to be a movie, but for a while, I thought I was listening to one of those talking books.
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33It's deeply ordinary, depressingly shabby stuff.
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30Life in the Bronx is hard, all right. Getting through a movie shouldn't be harder.
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30Empire devolves into a bloody revenge thriller with an ending as primitive as its opening is convoluted.
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30A retread of material already thoroughly plumbed by Martin Scorsese.
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25Witless, unoriginal mishmash of gangsta-drama clichés.
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20Too bad the central bedfellowship never gels, and Franc. Reyes's script turns a dissection of ambition into "Sleeping With the Enemy"-style nonsense.
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16Universal Pictures has a lot of gall to pick up a movie as thoroughly awful as Empire and -- with a straight face and a $20 million or so ad campaign -- thrust it on the holiday movie market as if it were a significant piece of filmmaking.
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10Serves a reheated notion on a creaky TV tray.
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10Doesn't deserve the energy it takes to describe how bad it is.
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