Alpha Dog

Aroview: The versatile Emile Hirsch plays a rich, white, and very teenage drug dealer whose charmed existence is threatened when a kidnapping-murder ploy spirals fatally out of control.

Plunged in the same corrosive suburban affluence of Larry Clark’s BULLY, but with a more apparent – if dubious – empathy for all-to-quickly matured lives of the spoilt and neglected, the film’s obvious difficulty is in glamorising the degenerative exploits of its bored youth, though at least lessens the blow by underscoring the negative outcome of their choices. The ensemble cast all get down and dirty amongst the unsavoury events at play, with Ben Foster a notable standout as a dope dealer with a big debt. Based on a true story, with a controversial twist: the film’s scheduled release coincided with – and thus, compromised – an actual trial of the real people involved.

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