Deemed a Tarantino wannabe in the wake of “Pulp Fiction” and then quickly put out to pasture by Miramax once Siskel & Ebert gave the movie “two thumbs down,” this highly uneven but occasionally soulful mob drama from writer Scott Rosenberg – helmed by his Boston University classmate Gary Fleder – has long carried a small cult following.
If only for the performances, Rosenberg's movie about characters with looming expiration dates (he wrote the film shortly after his father's passing) is worth checking out: Andy Garcia plays a mobster hoping to connect with beautiful Gabrielle Anwar, but saddled with intimidating a young man at the behest of wheelchair-bound mob boss Christopher Walken. Garcia assembles his old crew (Treat Williams, William Forsythe, Christopher Lloyd and Bill Nunn) but things go south fast – leading to to each one of them having to contemplate their mortal existences before a slick hit man (Steve Buscemi) comes calling.
Rosenberg's script was a hot commodity in the early '90s and the Weinstein brothers saw its potential, as Tony Scott among others tried to convince the screenwriter that they were better suited to direct it than the relatively inexperienced Fleder. The author, however, kept his word to his friend and retained Fleder despite overtures from bigger directors, though in the end, it's possible another filmmaking voice might have brought some stability to the material that the picture could've used. This is a story that veers from “contemporary noir” to offbeat comedy and romance, sometimes jarringly – it likewise will mix a moving speech (like Lloyd's conversation about being resigned to his fate) with grizzly bursts of violence, all with a dated visual aesthetic common to the mid '90s.
It's not a film that particularly works – and probably was only ever going to be admired by a small group – but there are pockets of it that are effective, along with a superb, poignant Michael Convertino score that sounds an awfully lot like Thomas Newman, but there's no need to plunder that topic again!
Imprint's Blu-Ray (1.85, 5.1/2.0) offers a number of excellent interviews with Rosenberg, Fleder, Garcia, and production designer Nelson Coates. Working with the Weinsteins is covered (Fleder recounts the moment when Bob Weinstein came up to him at the premiere and simply said “hey Gary, two thumbs down!” in reference to Gene and Roger's review), as is having to let go of a major actor who was having “prescription drug issues” (Rosenberg floats James Caan's name at one point but Fleder doesn't identify him by name). It's an interesting mix of comments from an era in which “chatty gangsters” were all the rage at the box-office, when one of the era's more revered scripts became a flat-out flop that its production company seemingly lost all interest in distributing.