This dusty, low key, low budget gangster film manages to hold the attention for the most part despite being very derivative and rather dull.<br /><br />For a character piece it's fatally flawed. The acting is strictly from the shout-and-then-repeat-with-added-F-words school of Italian-American gangster performances and very quickly gets tiresome. In fact it appears that much of it has been improvised, with director Abel Ferrara seemingly content that if the actors shout enough, get suitably red-faced and spittly, and repeat the same question enough times they'll qualify as "intense." They don't.<br /><br />Chris Penn is the worst offender, turning in an awful performance that wants to be Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant but emerges more like Christopher Lloyd in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.<br /><br />Christopher Walken plays himself but even that seems to disinterest him unless he's being given the chance to indulge in some painful "I'm an ac-tor!" moments - best demonstrated in the scene where he cries and shouts at his brother's corpse - and it's left to Gretchen Mol and Isabella Rossellini to deliver the only decent performances.<br /><br />Considering the budget the period feel is quite good, there's some occasional gratuitous violence to keep things interesting, and the generally depressing mood of the whole piece is quite effective, but those are small compensations for having to sit through all that repetitive shouting and those horribly self-indulgent performances.