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Review
Rating: ** out of five

Written by Jay Stone
Ottawa Citizen

If anyone thinks it's time to remake West Side Story, minus the music and dancing, but with a whole lot more gang-film cliches, then the good news is that Deuces Wild has arrived.

Better hurry, though, because this one looks like it will have the staying power of a street fight between the Deuces and the Vipers, and -- allowing for arful closeups and stylistic fade-ins and outs -- that seems to be about a minute and a half. Deuces While manages to combine the worst aspects of The Lords of Flatbush, Streets of Fire, Marty and the prequel to every Martin Scorsese movie. Mixed in are bits from an ancient favourite of mine, The Amboy Dukes, a lurid paperback by Irving Shulman featuring guys in white T-shirts, leather jackets and blue jeans, with switchblade knives in their back pockets, leading dangerously pointless lives in the quaintly gun-free streets of 1950s New Jersey.

They're all present in Deuces Wild, as are those other hardy perennials of the Brooklyn streets circa 1958: ducktail haircuts, flashy cars, a guy from one gang who falls in love with a girl from the rival gang, and people who say, "So whaddya wanna do tonight," to indicate the essential emptiness of these nostalgically violent days.

Stephen Dorff, the skinniest gang leader in the history of the borough, stars as Leon, who forms the Deues after his young brother, the dreamy Allie Boy, dies of a drug overdose. The drugs were sold to him by Marco (Norman Reedus) and Jimmy Pockets (Balthazar Getty), who live across the street.

As a result, Marco is sent to jail and Leon vows to keep the junk off his block. Thus the Deuces are a vigilante organization of kids in T-shirts, blue jeans, etc., whose worst crime is the sale of illegal fireworks. The Vipers, which is Marco and Jimmy's gang, are the bad kind of gang that doesn't care about how much junk flows down the gutters.

The wild card in all this is Fritzy (Matt Dillon), the mob boss who oversees the neighbourhood, teen gangs included, and doesn't care about the Deuces and the Vipers as long as they don't interfere with business. And when Marco is released from jail, it will ignite a powder keg of memories, vengeances and cliches unseen in gang films since... well, since the last one.

While all this seething is going on, Leon's brother Bobby (Brad Renfro) falls in love with Jimmy's sister Annie (Fairuza Balk), whose Brooklyn accent is so Flatbush that she could be elected mayor. This Romeo and Juliet story unfolds against the backdrop of drive-by zip-gunnings and baseball-bat battles in the park, not to mention the violation of Leon's girlfriend by Marco once he is out of the can and looking to get even.

There is also a streetwise priest trying to make peace, and several scenes of Leon in chruch, cleaning stained glass windows and finding it impossible to promise "faddah" that all the fighting will soon be over. And, there are two (count'em) frightened, dysfunctional mothers around to worry about their sons: Leon and Bobby's alcoholic mom, and Jimmy and Annie's insane mom, played by poor Deborah Harry, who sings Christman carols day and night and thinks Santa Claus is about the visit in the middle of New York City heat wave.

Later, when Annie wants to get away from it all -- this is the part in West Side Story where they would sing Somewhere -- we see her praying in a church. "Billy, I can't take it any more," she says. "I feel like I'm losing my mind."

Yes. Well.

Deuces Wild is directed by Scott Kalvert in short, semi-connected scenes that create a pastiche of the form: the gang is at the fir with their girls, a gang member is jumped and beaten in the park, there is a rumble, the priest urges caution Leon -- a one-man wrecking crew in the rumble -- arrives at the public swimming pool with his girlfriend and someone says, "Dere he is: the cavalry and his lovely tomato."

The point I'm trying to make is: what's the point?