Friday, March 14, 2014


Movie Review

Wannabes (2000)

January 25, 2002

FILM IN REVIEW; 'Wannabes'

Published: January 25, 2002

Directed by Charles A. Addessi and William A. DeMeo
Not rated, 110 minutes

There isn't a single image or vocal inflection in ''Wannabes'' -- a blunt, profanity-strewn morality tale set in an Italian-American neighborhood of New York -- that isn't familiar from ''The Sopranos'' or from countless movies about the mob. All the familiar stereotypes are on hand: the neighborhood boss, here named Santo (Joe Viterelli), squinting and coughing above his jowls in a smoke-filled room; his crew of beefy enforcers; his spoiled weasely son, Vinny (Joseph D'Onofrio); and his eager-beaver protÃ©gÃ© Angelo (William DeMeo).

This version of the standard fable follows the rise from nothing of a gang of four childhood friends, desperate to break out of their dead-end lives, who take up crime and discover how well it pays. That gang includes a bad older brother, Angelo, and a good younger one, Paulie (Conor Dubin), who as the story begins are both waiters in a neighborhood restaurant. Some of the best scenes detail the petty humiliations they endure at the hands of bullying patrons, the most obnoxious being Santo's rancid butterball of a son.

Sick and tired of such abuse, Angelo persuades Paulie and two of his friends to borrow $20,000 from a loan shark and go into the bookie business. After a perilous start, the enterprise takes off, but not before the four learn some brutal lessons in debt collection. The business expands when they acquire a partner from Coney Island and add loan sharking and the selling of fireworks to their catalog of services. Venturing into the protection racket, they attract the attention of Santo, who to his son's fury adopts Angelo as a protÃ©gÃ©. Sooner or later a showdown between the real son and the surrogate one is inevitable.

If there's nothing fresh about ''Wannabes,'' which was written by Mr. DeMeo, who produced and directed the film with Charles A. Addessi, much of the time the movie feels authentic. The insular criminal world it portrays -- a hothouse fief on the verge of implosion -- couldn't be meaner, grubbier and less glamorous. Although the screenplay lapses into speechifying whenever the brothers' Uncle Tommy (Ray Serra), the movie's official conscience, appears, much of the dialogue has a pungently idiomatic tang.

Except for Mr. Dubin's Paulie, who narrates the movie rather stiffly, the performances are uniformly strong. Mr. D'Onofrio's lethally rage-oholic Vinny is especially impressive. ''Wannabes'' doesn't really know how to end. But if its melodramatic final moments are ludicrous, they don't seriously dilute the acidity of the sour little swatch of urban sociology that has come before. STEPHEN HOLDEN

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