The son of actors John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Nick Cassavetes never came close to emulating his parents in his own acting career, writes Michael Dwyer
Since turning to directing in 1996, he has made five mediocre films (among them John Qand The Notebook), none of which can compare with his father's imaginative and innovative output as a director.
His latest feature, Alpha Dog, which he wrote and directed, is a factual drama of crime and decadence set among indolent, debauched young Americans with more money than morals, and all the time in the world to consume drugs, watch rap videos and go to parties. While hardly an original idea, it's a premise that proves interesting up to the point where it's squandered.
Mannered actor Emile Hirsch plays Johnny Truelove, a cocky 20-year-old drug dealer living comfortably off the lucrative proceeds in an affluent area of Los Angeles. He is incensed when a volatile junkie, Jake Mazursky (Ben Foster) fails to pay his bets, and Truelove's posse impulsively kidnaps Mazursky's 15-year-old half- brother (Anton Yelchin).
In addressing the malaises of the well-to-do young whites in Alpha Dog, Cassavetes keeps parents out of the picture for most part to demonstrate how far removed they are from the lifestyles of their offspring. The adults here are feckless, self- absorbed or over-protective, and the actors playing them - Bruce Willis, Harry Dean Stanton and Sharon Stone (the latter looking absurd at one point in a fat suit) - are saddled with thankless, underdeveloped roles.
The only actors to emerge with credit from Alpha Dogare the evidently talented Yelchin and, playing Truelove's best friend and the movie's sole morally conflicted character, Justin Timberlake, whose body is covered in tattoos.
Cassavetes, who controversially had access to files on the case that provided the basis of his screenplay, pointlessly - and inconsistently - slips in and out of docudrama mode, adding copious captions and interviews with the fictionalised characters. For all his purported concern regarding the issues he raises, he has made a movie that is as voyeuristic and exploitative as Larry Clark's lurid youth movies ( Kids, Ken Park, Bully) but never as provocative.
