CITY OF INDUSTRY
A film review by Walter Frith
Copyright 1997 Walter Frith
There is no honour among thieves. Point well taken but in 'City of Industry' there is no honour among the people who have put together this shallow, unrelenting and downright boring montage which has a promising start but then crashes and burns like a bad plane wreck.
A group of low life thieves (Harvey Keitel, Stephen Dorff, Timothy Hutton, Wade Dominguez) pull of what is a seemingly smooth heist by robbing a jewelry store and as they count up the loot in seclusion, one of them (Dorff) clumsily opens fire in a moment of greed and kills two others (Hutton and Dominguez). Keitel manages to escape but just barely and all this occurs in the first thirty five minutes of the film which begins well but goes nowhere after that. The last hour is a slow and monotonous opera of planned revenge as Keitel goes after Dorff since Hutton was Keitel's brother in the film and he is helped by Dominguez's widow (Famke Janssen) in a seedy payback scheme. It's also about betrayal and all those things you've seen before but with no new twist whatsoever.
The climax is predictable and the film is sort of like having a bad night's sleep. You know, one of those nights where you doze off and wake up and then doze off again and wake up again etc., etc. It's an uncomfortable odyssey into crime courtesy of director John Irvin ('The Dogs of War', 'Raw Deal', 'Hamburger Hill'). Were any of these any good?
The type of visual style that 'City of Industry' strives for is that of 'film noir' and the picture would have been much better if it had been in the hands of such stylish men as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino or Abel Ferrara. All of these intense filmmakers have directed Keitel with better results. 'City of Industry' is a copycat wannabe of films gone by and can easily be tossed into the junk pile in the opinion of this reviewer.
OUT OF 5> * 1/2
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