Alphabet City

Directed by Amos Poe, Alphabet City follows a low-level mafia figure (Vincent Spano’s Johnny) as he experiences a crisis of conscience after his bosses instruct him to burn down the building in which his mother (Zohra Lampert’s Mama) and sister (Jami Gertz’s Sophia) live. Filmmaker Poe, armed with a screenplay written alongside Gregory K. Heller and Robert Seidman, delivers a sluggish and terminally underwhelming disaster that strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go, as the picture, which boasts (or suffers from) the absolute thinnest of narratives, kicks off with a lackluster opening stretch that contains little in the way of compelling, attention-grabbing elements and attributes – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated by an absence of both forward momentum and fleshed-out characters. The movie’s episodic structure paves the way for a sluggish midsection that grows less and less interesting (and more and more intolerable) as time slowly progresses, and by the time the action-packed (yet hopelessly uninvolving) climax rolls around, Alphabet City has certainly cemented its place as a disastrous misfire of frustratingly palpable proportions.

* out of ****