The premise of a special society of teen runaways nesting on the rooftops of abandoned buildings on Manhattan's Lower East Side (specifically in such custom-renovated domiciles as a wooden water tower and a pigeon coop) shows some real imagination, over and above its primary intent to ensnare the youth audience. And the creation (by choreographer John Carrafa) of a form of non-contact kick-boxing, though no more easy to swallow than those Japanese samurai adventures about a blind swordsman, might be hailed in some quarters as a healthy alternative to gang violence (or to movies about same). And just when you thought there could be nothing new in the martial arts, they have dug up something from Brazil called capoeira, something that appears to transform a normal floor into either a trampoline or a waterbed. But the embarrassments, even if the things cited so far manage to slip below the threshold, are bountiful: characters called things like T-Bone ("T" for short), Squeak, and Lobo; bad guys out of a bottom-drawer TV cop show; plot developments (love scene, gang-slaying, revenge) slotted into place by strictest formula. All of this, and the regulation rock score poured on top of it, might easily be shrugged off as just another day at the movies, 1989, but for the fact that it was directed by Robert Wise, a septuagenarian responsible for some of the better American movies over a thirty-five-year period from 1944 to 1979 (his heretofore most recent effort). Rooftops does not now extend the period of his supremacy to 1989 and to forty-five years total. It only shows he can even still make a movie like nearly everyone else can make, when what we want from a man of his experience is to make a movie like almost no one anymore can make, a movie like only he can make. In a word, a Wise movie, not an un-Wise one. With Jason Gedrick, Troy Beyer, and Eddie Velez. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd
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