Lorenzo Carcaterra's best-selling revenge tale, obligingly but dubiously filed on the nonfiction bookshelves, of a quartet of Hell's Kitchen hellions who are sent together to the Wilkenson Home for Boys, are routinely beaten, tortured, and sexually abused by a quartet of Gestapo-esque guards, and then -- with The Count of Monte Cristo as their holy book and how-to manual -- settle the score fifteen years after the "fact." The movie dwells on the early atrocities to such an extent as to cancel the need of any moral struggle or debate in the later stages. And the only one to struggle with those kinds of issues at all -- the sympathetic parish priest and basketball buddy, Father Bobby, who is called upon to perjure himself in court -- must struggle with them alone and off screen. Possibly, for some, the more serious consequence of the dwelling-on-atrocities is that most of the promised stars -- Brad Pitt, Jason Patric, Dustin Hoffman -- are kept out of sight for at least the movie's first hour. Only Robert De Niro as the priest is on hand from the get-go. Only De Niro, that is, and the Voice of Jason Patric, reciting the ancillary text of first-person narration. And even when the rest of stars do come out, they all are muzzled and muffled by a general strategy of conspiratorial underplaying: mumbles and murmurs. That writer-director Barry Levinson should have been attracted to this project, unmalleable and unswallowable as it is, marks him as lacking in several kinds of sense, but none worse than the lack of cinematic sense. With Kevin Bacon, Minnie Driver. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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