"You think ambushing me in some nightclub's gonna stop what makes people take drugs? This country spends $100 billion a year on getting high, and it's not because of me. All that time I was wasting in jail, it just got worse. I'm not your problem. I'm just a businessman."
Abel Ferrera's, King of New York, is a tightly made, expressionistic gangster film of the late 80s culminating in one of the most grittiest and simultaneously beautiful portrayals of NYC's streets. Has 42nd Street ever acted better?
Christopher Walken is absolutely lights out; a no-holds-barred tour de force as the stoic yet flamboyant kingpin, Frank White. Larry Fishbourne, too, gives us one of the most memorable trigger-happy henchmen I have ever seen. The ensemble lays everything down here and it shows.
The duality of good and evil is not truly answered here and it is portrayed through the hyper-vigilante cops that get mentally derailed by a bureaucratic system and the experienced gangsters under Frank White (using the drug cartels to fund a hospital for the less fortunate in the South Bronx). David Caruso's hot-headed cop Gilley gets this right when he says as much to his buddies at the bar. Both sides find themselves speaking truths that put the faulty system into question, and show us no true villain or hero (Frank White mainly being portrayed as an anti-hero).
So far this is unlike any of the other Ferrera films I have seen, and according to most reviews it is. King of New York is his tightest and most straight forward film, and even though Ferrera himself claimed he was frustrated making it the reward is more than bountiful.
Abel Ferrera's, King of New York, is a tightly made, expressionistic gangster film of the late 80s culminating in one of the most grittiest and simultaneously beautiful portrayals of NYC's streets. Has 42nd Street ever acted better?
Christopher Walken is absolutely lights out; a no-holds-barred tour de force as the stoic yet flamboyant kingpin, Frank White. Larry Fishbourne, too, gives us one of the most memorable trigger-happy henchmen I have ever seen. The ensemble lays everything down here and it shows.
The duality of good and evil is not truly answered here and it is portrayed through the hyper-vigilante cops that get mentally derailed by a bureaucratic system and the experienced gangsters under Frank White (using the drug cartels to fund a hospital for the less fortunate in the South Bronx). David Caruso's hot-headed cop Gilley gets this right when he says as much to his buddies at the bar. Both sides find themselves speaking truths that put the faulty system into question, and show us no true villain or hero (Frank White mainly being portrayed as an anti-hero).
So far this is unlike any of the other Ferrera films I have seen, and according to most reviews it is. King of New York is his tightest and most straight forward film, and even though Ferrera himself claimed he was frustrated making it the reward is more than bountiful.