The friends, the neighborhood, the loyalty, the bloodshed, Alec Baldwin playing a tough-as-nails wise guy (no, he doesn’t leave answering-machine messages) … feel free to stop me when all this stops sounding familiar.
Completed in 2004, “Brooklyn Rules” may be screenwriter Terence Winter’s (a frequent “Sopranos” scribe) attempt to write from his own life, but this tale of a trio of boyhood friends negotiating the streets of mob-infested Brooklyn still feels warmed over at best. It’s also a disappointing return to the director’s chair for Michael Corrente, whose last film was 2000’s underappreciated soccer film, “A Shot at Glory.”
Nobody will quibble with Scott Caan as a preening Brooklynite named Carmine, or even with Jerry Ferrara of “Entourage” as Carmine’s cheapskate boyhood friend, Bobby. And Baldwin, as mob boss Caesar Manganaro, who both assigns and administers payback? Puh-lease! The guy could play this hood from his deathbed.
But Freddie Prinze Jr. as a charismatic con man who dreams of life across the bridge and is one unholy alliance away from being another Carmine? That’s a harder swallow. Since Prinze’s character, Michael, is most precisely drawn – and Prinze is narrating – a believable Michael seems key to propelling the scenario past clichédom.
Prinze isn’t up to it. He’s too preppy, and the accent conveys acting school rather than street. When Michael hooks up with white-bread fellow Columbia student Ellen (Mena Suvari), there’s no danger there. Not even when Michael gets into an ill-advised fight with a mob hothead.
By night, Michael works in a butcher shop where the occurrence of hits and torture seems to be as prevalent as rump roast. By day, he cons his way out of taking important midterms at Columbia. Carmine wants in on the mob action (at one point, he hijacks a truck carrying a load of trivia board games). Bobby eyes a career in the U.S. Postal Service.
Interspersed among sundry murders and character-defining set pieces (yeah, we get that Bobby counts his pennies), Winter is looking to chronicle a personal journey, except we’ve seen this before. By film’s end, when Michael is summoned back to Brooklyn for a momentous occasion, you’ll know every one of those alleged “rules” by heart.
And in all likelihood, you won’t much care.
“Brooklyn Rules”
R for violence, pervasive language, sexual content|1 hour, 39 minutes|MOB DRAMA|Directed by Michael Corrente; starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Scott Caan, Alec Baldwin, Mena Suvari, Jerry Ferrara.|Opens today at area theaters.
