Alpha Dog (2006)
Average Rating: 5.5/10
Reviews Counted: 143
Fresh: 78 | Rotten: 65
A glossy yet unflinching portrait of violent, hedonistic teenagers. Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone chew the scenery, while Justin Timberlake gives a noteworthy performance.
Average Rating: 5.4/10
Critic Reviews: 41
Fresh: 21 | Rotten: 20
A glossy yet unflinching portrait of violent, hedonistic teenagers. Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone chew the scenery, while Justin Timberlake gives a noteworthy performance.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.3/5
User Ratings: 420,966
Movie Info
A drug dealer moves on to bigger crimes in an effort to settle a score with disastrous results in this drama inspired by actual events. Though barely out of his teens, Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) has already built a lucrative career for himself selling drugs -- he has his own home, a luxury car, and posse of friends who do double duty as his crew, including Elvis (Shawn Hatosy), Frankie (Justin Timberlake), and Tiko (Fernando Vargas). While life at Johnny's house is usually a constant party
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Cast
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Emile Hirsch
Johnny Truelove -
Justin Timberlake
Frankie Ballenbacher -
Bruce Willis
Sonny Truelove -
Sharon Stone
Olivia Mazursky -
Ben Foster
Jake Mazursky -
Anton Yelchin
Zack Mazursky -
Alex Kingston
Tiffy Hartunian -
Harry Dean Stanton
Cosmo Gadabeeti -
Alex Solowitz
Bobby "911" Tiko -
Fernando Vargas
"TKO" Martinez -
Olivia Wilde
Angela Holden -
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Lukas Haas
Buzz Fecske -
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David Thornton
Butch Mazursky -
Christopher George M...
Keith Stratten -
Vincent Kartheiser
Pick Giamo -
Dominique Swain
Susan Hartunian -
Shawn Hatosy
Elvis Schmidt -
Heather Wahlquist
Wanda Haynes -
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Alpha Dog Trailer & Photos
All Critics (145) | Top Critics (42) | Fresh (78) | Rotten (65) | DVD (18)
A movie which has been put together with occasional skill but lacks a compelling reason to exist.
Top CriticJustin Timberlake has what it takes to be a genuine movie star.
The worst movie of the year.
Alpha Dog is no travesty, but I would trade 95 percent accuracy for, say, 25 percent insight.
Cassavetes starts to lose the plot at the precise moment he starts keeping exact track of it.
Alpha Dog, a tale of a group of drug-fueled teenagers, is gritty to the point of painful abrasion.
This inspired-by-reality tale is essentially an emotional snuff film. It's the kind of misguided effort a middle-aged director indulges in when he wants to reinvent himself as edgy.
Cassavetes' film is pure Hollywood fiction and sensationalism mixed with some sense of reality, but hell I enjoyed it a great deal...
A lackluster teenage true-crime tale.
Stylishly and thoughtfully directed by Nick Cassavetes, Alpha Dog is occasionally chilling, but always absorbing.
Its originality lies in the fact that it depicts white middle-class kids on the loose, calling their women bitches and listening endlessly to violent, misogynist and homophobic black rap.
Nick Cassavetes' film combines an aimless ramble through juvenile depravity in the affluent suburbs of LA and a quite disturbing evocation of the true-life murder of an adolescent boy in 1999.
It's Beverly Hills 90210 on crystal meth as a gang of posh potheads lose the plot when a kidnapping goes wrong.
The movie may lose its way in the last 15 minutes but everything leading up to that point is gripping, edge-of-your-seat stuff.
Lengthy and often off-hot topic, this is still a gripping saga with stand-out turns from Timberlake, Hirsch and kid-in-the-spotlight Yelchin.
You know you're in trouble the second you take a look at Bruce Willis's fake liver spots.
Overall though, it's a messy, superficial affair: it lacks focus, shifts uneasily in tone, and shoehorns in star names (Sharon Stone, Bruce Willis) to little effect.
True, Alpha Dog is a film with no manners. But it has great nerve. What's truly impressive is how the splintered story is buried by individual performances.
Worth seeing for Stone's grotesque bow and some great youthful performances. But it's not half as gritty as it thinks it is.
It suffers from ADD, but there's some terrific stuff in here. Leaving 15 minutes from the end and saving yourself a lumbering coda may improve enjoyment.
Emotionally engaging, impressively directed and frequently tense drama with strong performances from a terrific ensemble cast.
Cassavetes uses a wide arsenal of flashy techniques...but his stylistic fourishes and some committed performances cannot disguise a certain emptiness where there should be tragedy.
Cassavetes, first and foremost, made Alpha Dog a great ensemble piece, a decision that really distinguishes the film from its lesser teenage crime counterparts.
As it happens, not all dogs to to heaven. Some go straight to hell, and Alpha Dog gets there faster and stays there longer than most.
The film's most resonant insight%u2014not a new one%u2014is that the boys' mutual violence and abuse form a sort of intimacy. No matter what else they miss, they understand their own fearfulness and disloyalty.
Audience Reviews for Alpha Dog
Super Reviewer
Johnny Truelove is a flashy pot dealer who hates when people owe him money. When the volatile Jake Mazursky owes him such a debt, but double crosses him, Johnny and his cohorts resort to kidnapping Jake's little brother as collateral.
Things get interesting when the kid, Zack, who has many chances to escape, decides that he's okay with the situation, and wants to stay. He actually starts to get friendly with Johnny's right hand man Frankie who acts as the kid's handler. But unfortunately, things don't end up so wonderful when the situation becomes hard to contain, and Johnny doesn't know how to deal with it all.
The film courted controversy since it was based on an actual story, and that case was still sorta going on when the film was being made. And apparently writer/director Nick Cassavetes also had insider access to a lot of information to use in his fictionalization of things.
At first, I wasn't sure if I was gonna like this movie. Hardly any of the characters are likable, and most are absolutely awful people with few, if any redeeming qualities. I stuck with it though, since sometimes, situations that go from bad to worse are actually more interesting when you don't feel bad for anybody, and you get to see them get what they deserve. Granted, that also makes for a tough viewing experience, but thankfully, some of them do come around and I started to connect with them a little bit.
The story mostly plays out as a typical film, but is peppered with documentary style interview bits, kind of like an investigative journalism piece. I'm not against this type of storytelling, but maybe it would have been better had they just kept it like a regular movie. Or just went totally all out, and present the non-interview parts as like flashbacks or something.
Even though this is a rough movie about despicable people, I still kinda liked it. It does kinda drag on a bit at the end, but until then is pretty well paced. I think that having the characters be stupid, ineffectual, and panicky adds a nice spin to a familiar type of story, but it also makes things more wrenching since it's based on actual events. I think if I had a personal connection to this story I may not be able to enjoy, or even endure such a thing.
Even though the characters are vile, that's just the way they're supposed to be. The star studded cast do a pretty terrific job here. In smaller supporting roles we get veterans like Harry Dean Stanton, Bruce Willis, and Sharon Stone, and they do okay, but the film is practically carried by the youngsters. Emile Hirsch is fine as Johhny, Ben Foster is positively unhinged as Jake, and Anton Yelchin is pretty solid as Zack. As Frankie, Justin Timberlake is surprisingly strong. He (and some of the others) come off as trying to act black a bit too much, and it's a tad annoying, but other than that, he proves he's got chops, and I can see why he went on to make some more movies after this. We also get a host of lovely ladies including Olivia Wilde, Amanda Seyfried, Amber Heard, and Dominique Swain among others.
All in all, this film is okay. It's a bit of a mess at times, but it's still rather compelling and engaging, despite the messed up scenario and wretched characters. I'm torn on the specific rating, so let's split it between 3 and 3.5. Though I'm giving it a milder recommendation, I think you should still give it a look.
Super Reviewer
Movies Like Alpha Dog
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- Jake Mazursky: This is just the beginning, bitch. This is lil shooter. You're dead, homes. You hear me, you fucking dwarf! I know where your mother lives I know where your brother lives, I know where your papi lives! You wanna play some games motherfucker!
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- Johnny Truelove: You ever have that dream: the one where you did something... You don't know why, but you can never go back?
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- Angela Holden: So you're like... ransom.
- Zack Mazursky: It's ok. Its like another story to tell my grandchildren
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