Empire
One of the pleasures of going to the movies, even one ultimately as underwhelming as the new drugs-n-thugs movie "Empire," is the occasional surprise. Somewhere in its middle, "Empire," which up to this point has refused to say anything "New Jack City" didn't say 10 years before, presents Isabella Rossellini as its kingpin.
The lady's name is Joanna Menendez, but her terrified operators call her La Colombiana, and she lives like Norma Desmond before the pictures got small. Rossellini's hair has been teased to Sophia Loren extremes, but her threatening drug mami purrs like a kitty cat. Rossellini doesn't do much more than show up and be a hundred kinds of ravishing. Yet there's a movie in her ageless face and that untamed bouffant.
First-time writer-director Franc. Reyes knows this, but he doesn't bother to explore it. Instead, he pushes his shopping cart through the ghetto-drug-flick warehouse, where all the merchandise has been picked over like a Filene's sale rack on the day after Thanksgiving. "Empire" tells us the story of Victor Rosa (John Leguizamo). He's a South Bronx big-timer, slinging the designer heroin that gives the movie its name. After meeting Jack (Peter Sarsgaard), an investment banker, at a party, Victor decides to go legit. His exit strategy is the stock market. The lifestyle change becomes him: Jack leases him a grand SoHo loft and introduces him to Armani. (It's off-the-rack, but still.)
His pregnant, striving girlfriend, Carmen (Delilah Cotto), doesn't like this reupholstered, downtown Victor. It's over for her once he stops wearing his dead brother's big gold G around his neck. Sorry, girl: Not even Armani makes anything to turn that into a discreet accessory.
It's Carmen who brings Victor and Jack together, thanks to her friendship with Jack's girlfriend, Trish - played by a crypto-ghetto Denise Richards, who seems, at last, to have found herself. As performed by the pudding-voiced Sarsgaard, Jack is a Twinkie filled with smarm.
Obviously, things go dead wrong, and as they do Reyes tries to make parallels between street crime and corporate crime intersect. But "Empire" has the misfortune of being hung up on its retread parable. (Not to mention the my-first-movie voice-over narration and the droopy Ruben Blades score). We've seen the moral in Reyes's story in everything from "Scarface" and "Mean Streets" to the far more rickety "Straight Out of Brooklyn." For your information, this movie is closer to the latter.
Way back in 1995, the ghetto-escape drama was pretty much put to bed with Spike Lee's optimistic "Clockers," which saw the life beyond hustling. Everything since seems pointless or uncertain - the cream of the post-"Clockers" crop, Hype Williams's wildly influential "Belly," works only as an eye-popping fantasia. Reyes, for his part, seems parched for original style. His cinematographer, Kramer Morgenthau, tries to rescue him, but the camera can't really pretty up the fact that Reyes's script is creatively challenged.
This doesn't mean Reyes needn't have bothered with "Empire" at all. There are fresh possibilities in the margins of "Empire" that could be whipped into an ingenious piece of urban storytelling. Victor and Jack's relationship, for instance, should set off even the biggest thug's gaydar. And speaking of, nothing is made of the sunken-cheeked, rough-looking, and un-closeted dealer who sells a drug called Dancing Queen. You'd like to think that he and La Colombiana would have turned this movie into the fabulous block party it's too nervous to be.
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