Deuces Wild

Rating:
Summary: Let's See. . . How Unoriginal Can We Be?
Review: Why was this movie made? It was pretty much the same plot as West Side Story. I know that all any story is is another way of looking at another earlier one, but this had nothing new to offer. Brad Renfro plays the younger brother of the leader of a gang called the Deuces whose job it is to clean up the city. They do this by dropping cement blocks onto cars (note my sarcastic tone) and by chasing after those nasty Vipers (?), who were responsible for the death of Renfro and Dorff's other brother. We are informed right from the beginning that the Deuces are good and the Vipers are bad, and that is all there is to it. At least in West Side Story, things were a little more complicated than that. I remember when I was younger, I thought that the Jets were good and the Sharks were bad because the Jets were in more scenes, but I was wrong. The truth was, they were both equally responsible for what happened and perhaps the Jets were worse for refusing to share the city. In this movie, everything is babied-down for us. Questioning the hero's actions? We can't have that! In this movie, we do get a glimpse of the parents of these wild children, and they are a sorry sight. Why, that's half the story there, trying to sicken us with these pitiful maternal figures. Perhaps the writers and director of West Side Story knew what they were doing when they made the parents of the kids non-existent (as far as camera time was concerned).
Two stars for the delightful Frankie Muniz and the comical Matt Dillon "Cement blocks don't fall from the sky unless I allow it (?)". And yet again, here is a movie where I am more likely to favor the villain over the "good guys". Though I wouldn't want to know Marco in real life, on screen, he was cool. Hell of a lot cooler than those deuces. Though Vipers is a threatening name with an evil connotation, I think the Deuces were worse off with theirs.