SUICIDE KINGS *1/2 (out of four) -a film review by Bill Chambers (For more purple critiques, Visit FILM FREAK CENTRAL: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/7504 Ask for Bill)
starring Christopher Walken, Jay Mohr, Dennis Leary, Sean Patrick Flannery written and directed by Peter O'Fallon
Walken stars as a mobster who is kidnapped and held for ransom by four bratty rich kids. It seems that a woman has also been kidnapped--she is the sister of one of them (E.T.'s Henry Thomas) and the girlfriend of another (Flannery)--and the asking price is $2 million, which said snots are unable to cough up alone. They even cut off Walken's finger to show they mean business, because they are desperate to save the woman's life.
Suicide Kings is a terrible film. Walken aside, there isn't a single appealing cast member. O'Fallon creates characters that are functional types without any resonance. In an amusingly unironic scene, Walken plays poker with the foursome and describes each of their personalities to a tee--it's as if he was reading the summary sheet for a casting director.
The plot is another issue entirely. O'Fallon is someone whom I'm betting has seen Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects too many times, for not only does his story veer off on bizarre tangents from whence they never return (do we really need the scene where Dennis Leary beats up an abusive father with a toaster, which is entirely unrelated to both the story and Leary's character, or the numerous anecdotal sequences?), but the central plot itself is a serpentine mess, filled with crosses and double crosses and triple crosses... By the fourth big revelation/twist, I had completely tuned out, wondering what on Earth attracted these actors to the material.
Recently a peer, a fellow young filmmaker, informed me that he had an idea for a movie about four guys, the mob, and the FBI. It occurred to me then what's wrong with indies like Suicide Kings: I suspect O'Fallon has never met a mobster, is not a rich man, doesn't deliver endless "clever" monologues to his friends about his favourite types of boots... In short, these guys are just riffing on other movies, and in doing that, making the same film over and over and over again. Tarantino found his niche and now hundreds of GenXers with movie cameras are trying to find Tarantino's niche instead of carving their own. -Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
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