"Now we can ignore each other in peace..."

Rating: 5/10 (13 January 2008)

Past and present collage of a youthful neo-Nazi skinhead in Venice Beach, California, his life going into a tailspin after the gang-related murder of his father. After killing some neighborhood thugs, the skinhead serves jail time and is eventually paroled (and reformed), yet he can't seem to straighten out his erratic family, particularly his younger brother who seems intent on following down the same ugly path. Director Tony Kaye puts the squeeze on us right from the start, staging a blacks vs. whites basketball game as if it were Epic Human Drama (photographed in black-and-white, with slow-motion effects and a heavenly choir). The superlative performances nearly carry the picture, yet screenwriter David McKenna lays on the be-true-to-yourself rhetoric with a trowel (and yet lets the opposite side get their licks in too, whittling the film down to a battle of speeches ladled with words like 'empowerment'). The jailhouse scenes are the strongest, but the family drama and the sidebars with the police (who also get to make speeches) are uncomfortably contrived. ** from ****