In basic outline a conventional thriller about drug dealings in Brooklyn, but renovated almost to a condition of like-new. Screenwriter Boaz Yakin (of Clint Eastwood's The Rookie), here making his directorial debut, has bright ideas about virtually everything, some of them studied or showoffy, but none of them sloppy or secondhand. Sometimes the abstractness and audacity of them approach the visionary: the filling-in, right at the start of the movie, of a contemporary cityscape piece by piece, suggesting a sort of time-lapse passage from small-town virginity to urban defloration; or the several superimposed mental images of railroad tracks representing the possibility of flight, escape (realistically, the tracks are where the hero stashes his drug-delivery wages in a rusty tin can). Those two examples are especially apposite in a movie shot through with a sense of pain and nostalgia over the loss of innocence, and shot through with a sense of crisis and urgency over the battle to hang onto it. The precocious twelve-year-old hero (Sean Nelson) already when we meet him possesses a deadened impassive gaze, even when just shooting the breeze with boys his own age or trying his wings at amatory flirtation. Is it too late for him? ("Anything lost," according to the tenets of paternal wisdom, "can be found again. Except time.") The plot eventually thickens, but the character inversely thins. As the architect of his own fate, a schemer, a manipulator, a master strategist, he ceases to be believable as a mere child. And the lessons learned from his chess-master father (Samuel L. Jackson, essentially playing the Larry Fishburne role from Searching for Bobby Fischer) cannot fully account for his cunningness and sangfroid. Cannot account remotely. He becomes a sort of Spirit of Childhood, a guardian angel, an avenging angel, all rolled into one. Even then, the tear he sheds at the fadeout is nearly as humanizing, nearly as redeeming, nearly as touching, as that of Kim Novak at the end of Bell, Book, and Candle. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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