PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
With its cast of up-and-coming non A-list stars, Suicide Kings profoundly succeeds where other all-boy ensemble casts (like The Newton Boys) generally fail. It is a wickedly dark comedy that revolves around dual kidnappings, one the daughter of a wealthy New York family and the other of an ex-Mafia boss.
The first abduction is of Lisa Chasten (Laura R. Harris), who is scooped up whilst in the throes of parking lot passion with her secret boyfriend and doctor wannabe, Max Minot (Jeremy Sisto, Clueless). Max is the only witness to the crime, but can offer precious few details.
Although he is affluent beyond my wildest dreams, Lisa's father can't get his hands on the two million-dollar ransom and misses the first payoff deadline. Then, one of Lisa's digits is delivered, so the picture shifts to a backup plan.
It seems that Lisa's brother Avery (Henry Thomas, Niagara, Niagara) decides to befriend and kidnap Charles Barrett (Christopher Walken, The Prophecy). Why Charles Barrett? Well, here's one clue – his name used to be Carlo Bertolucci. Charles decided to change it when he retired as the head of the New York crime family syndicate, on the road to the straight and narrow.
Avery, Max and their bratty socialite schoolmates, Brett (Jay Mohr, Jerry Maguire) and T.K. (Sean Patrick Flannery, Powder) figure if they can get Charles attention, he can help locate Lisa's captors and quickly resolve the whole incident. They befriend him at his daily dinner digs, convince him to take a little car ride through his `old neighborhood' and hit him with the chloroform once the trip begins.
Dragging him back to a summer home of the Chasten family, the rich kids demand assistance from the drugged Charles. Enter comic relief from geeky worrywart Ira (Johnny Galecki, Roseanne) and shoe fetishist Lono Vecchio (Denis Leary, The Ref) and that's when real fun begins.
Suicide Kings is wryly written by Wayne Rice and Gina Goldman, the latter a producer of the television series The Wonder Years. It is the feature film debut of Peter O'Fallon, an Emmy award winning director best known for his work on such shows as Northern Exposure, thirtysomething and Party of Five. His stylish and highly entertaining filming can only lead one to hope that frigging television naysayers will shut the hell up about my second favorite medium.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews