Empire

A South Bronx drug dealer (Leguizamo) with an uncommon sense of honor and professionalism longs for a better life and thinks he has found his way into mainstream respectability when he meets slick and duplicitous Wall Street investment banker Jack Wimmer (Sarsgaard in an uncharacteristically one-dimensional performance). Things go well at first and he believes he has left his old life behind for good but then disaster strikes.

Written and directed by Franc Reyes this was a star vehicle for non-star John Leguizamo who also co-produced. Its pretensions are toward being a modern version of a 1930's Warner Brothers gangster picture with the Shakespearian rise and fall of a strong-willed character. Instead it falls flat with a preposterous premise and stereotypical shoot-em up elements.

This is a thoroughly amateurish production right down to the casting of the extras and one wonders why solid actors like Sarsgaard, Rosellini, Serrano and Braga would have let themselves get talked into doing something like this.

Reyes may have thought he was being clever by giving roles to people that aren't really actors but the result is a mess filled with awful performances that only picks up energy at the end (by which time most of the amateur actors' characters have been killed off).