Instinto Assassino

Strays is brutally honest and... beautifully executed. It uses harsh words and harsher actions to portray a lifestyle that is real and not sugar coated for the audience. It does not apologize for this but instead asks us to understand the truth being portrayed. A war without blood would not be accurate. These lives without the brutal language would be false and would strip the movie of its commitment to honesty.

The acting, directing, and writing in this movie was done with absolute attention to detail. I deeply enjoyed this movie. It was fresh and new and at times so real and raw I felt like a voyeur. Rick's life unfolds before us and we are taken along on a journey through his emotional awakening. Gracefully it allows us to experience the lives of its characters without judgment.

This in turn gives us the freedom to feel and grow along with them. It evokes emotion and dialogue and is in my opinion a great work of art.

Sometimes the combination of good writing, good direction and good casting collides into a great movie. Writer/Director Vin Diesel stars as Rick, the emotional center to a very strong ensemble of acquired family. The older brother who is finally facing the future, Rick tries to develop a new life while still taking care of his circle of strays. He rebels from his sex-filled nights against Salvatore, a womanizing freeloader and his drug-providing past with Fred, his not so bright cousin. Their unending loyalty keeps the "family" strong, even when he falls in love with a midwestern outsider, Heather. Perceptive and extremely witty writing keeps the pace throughout the film, and his chemistry with Fred, played beautifully by Joey Dedio, is worth the price of the ticket alone.

This movie rang very true to me. Excellent dialog for the most part. There were some funny parts as well, but mostly it was an honest portrayal of a similar kind of life I used to live. This is as good as anything Spike Lee has done on a similar low budget and your hat as to go off to Vin Diesel for the effort. The only small negative, as others have mentioned, was some of the confrontational language was a bit exaggerated and unnecessary. One really great scene was Vin Diesel singing "If I only had a heart" from the Wizard of Oz... that just plain worked. The interracial friendships were heartening and rang true.

'Strays' is breakout film for Vin Diesel - after years struggling as an actor going from audition to audition and still not getting any parts, Vin Diesel wrote, directed and starred in his own movie that finally gave him a role in Steven Spielberg's 'Saving Private Ryan' and from there the star was in the making. Although Vin Diesel is best known for portraying one dimensional meat heads and action heroes he has later shown that he got some more acting chops in such films like 'Find My Guilty' or 'Boiler Room', but 'Strays' was were it all started. Don't expect anything on Woody Allen level, but here Vin showing off his acting skills, and his directing skills is not very off. Although 'Strays' starts bit slow, it manages to build up interest in first half an hour (too long, some might say), but we are still left with an hour and ten minutes worth well paced story with characters we start to care about enough to stick to the end.

Vin Diesel followed one other muscular Hollywood legend's path and wrote his own starring role. Vin's effort never reached far in popularity and it never become classic, but with that little film he managed to create another example how one can build his own success.

This film also left me guessing what kind of Vin Diesel the world would know if he would kept directing (he obviously had some talent for that) and writing, rather than going on to play in all those silly triple X and Fast and Furious movies.

Review: Although the movie seems cheap and it doesn't really start off that well, it does end up with a moral to the story and it's good to see Vin Diesel really act. We are all used to seeing Diesel play the tough guy in his big budget movies, but in this film he shows that he has a heart and that bullets can't always bounce off of his body. All of the cast look like there on steroids, except for Mike Epps, and it has a deep undertone of a band of brothers who grow up doing everything together. Personally, I hated the beginning, but when the storyline kicks in its pretty average. If you keep in mind that this was made with a very low budget, totally by Vin Diesel, it is well put together but it's not a classic like earlier Scorsese movies, which it did remind me of. Average!

Round-Up: After watching Riddick last week, it's amazing to see how far Diesel has come. It's a shame that Diesel doesn't show his acting skills more in his movies because he actually can act. At this point, we all know what to expect from his films. They all seem to be big budget action movies which shows that he has become type casted. Maybe he needs to go back to the drawing board to show that he doesn't have to show his muscles and kick ass in all of his films. As for the other cast, you can tell that this is the first time that they have been in front of a camera, but the chemistry between the cast seemed very real.

I recommend this movie to people who want to see an early Vin Diesel trying to get out of the hood and falling in love. 3/10