CITY OF INDUSTRY (42)

Directed by: John Irvin

Starring: Harvey Keitel, Stephen Dorff, Timothy Hutton, Famke Janssen

The Pitch: After a heist goes wrong, one of the robbers tries to track down the man who killed his brother.

Theo Sez: An attempt (helmed by the director of such character-driven fare as TURTLE DIARY and WIDOWS' PEAK) to inject a little humanity into the macho posturing of generic post-Tarantino situations, featuring such details as the two brothers behind the heist worrying about their elderly mother, or a robber's widow tearfully having to explain to her kids that their father's dead. It's an interesting hybrid, mixing (or trying to mix) this kind of sensitivity with the deliberate brutalism suggested by the title, an implacable rhythm and a grim, moody look - trailer parks, tawdry bars, abandoned refineries. Hard to say why it doesn't quite work, but maybe it's just because the characters aren't interesting enough : it's instructive to compare it to a film like HEAT, which works the other way round - emphasising the cold, pitiless urban surface and then gradually worming human dilemmas into it, making its characters' relationship to their environment increasingly complicated. Here, the people don't really grow after the halfway mark - Keitel an avenging angel, Dorff an increasingly one-dimensional psycho - and the environment gradually takes over, subsuming them into its heartlessness and reducing them to its own harsh, primitive texture. By the end it's become a stiff, thoroughly dry movie, hard to get excited about and even harder to recommend ; except of course to Keitel completists, if only for its near-definitive sample of their idol's infamous Wail Of Anguish.