Maybe if the movie had left all the expensive period artifacts, and most of the hackneyed script, on the street corner and let its capable young cast loose, Deuces Wild would have offered the audience a more interesting game.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2014

A repellent orgy of gratuitous violence and hackneyed melodrama, Deuces Wild marks a grim nadir for everyone involved.

| Jun 3, 2013

It not only promotes every stereotype and invokes every clich of Brooklyn lore, it combines them all into an insulting composite, fuses that to the chrome-and-fins of the pointless Fifties, and then -- weirdly -- pretends it's Shakespeare.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 3, 2013

Skip it. Just fill in the blanks and you too can brew the same bland, goopy mixture.

| Jun 3, 2013

A flashback to a heroin casualty on a rain-soaked playground is a crucial visual aid, but any punch-drunk victim of Deuces Wild might prefer the needle to the damage done.

| Jun 3, 2013

This is a movie that can't say no to a melodramatic opportunity, and whatever verisimilitude inspired Paul Kimatian and Christopher Gambale to write a script based on Kimatian's memories of the gangs has been utterly lost along the way.

| Oct 18, 2008

Slow-motion shots of swaggering tough guys punctuate this painfully hackneyed gang drama set in late-50s Brooklyn.

| Mar 7, 2007

The script from first-timers Paul Kimatian and Christopher Gambale requires Dillon to say corny things like: 'Bricks don't fall outta the sky in this neighborhood unless I'm throwin' 'em.' Tony Soprano, he ain't.

| Mar 7, 2007

Astonishing isn't the word -- neither is incompetent, incoherent or just plain crap. Indeed, none of these words really gets at the very special type of badness that is Deuces Wild.

Full Review | Aug 5, 2002

Gets the look and the period trappings right, but it otherwise drowns in a sea of visual and verbal clichs.

| Original Score: 1/5 | May 5, 2002

Propelled not by characters but by caricatures.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | May 3, 2002

No telegraphing is too obvious or simplistic for this movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 3, 2002

If there's a heaven for bad movies, Deuces Wild is on its way.

| Original Score: 1/5 | May 3, 2002

Deuces Wild is a beautifully textured movie with its heart in the right place. Yet it badly wants a mature sense of esthetic balance, restraint and decorum.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 3, 2002

It's tough to tell which is in more abundant supply in this woefully hackneyed movie, directed by Scott Kalvert, about street gangs and turf wars in 1958 Brooklyn -- stale cliches, gratuitous violence, or empty machismo.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 3, 2002

It's clear why Deuces Wild, which was shot two years ago, has been gathering dust on MGM's shelf.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 3, 2002

Brainless, but enjoyably over-the-top, the retro gang melodrama, Deuces Wild represents fifties teen-gang machismo in a way that borders on rough-trade homo-eroticism.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 3, 2002

This hackneyed throwback to greasers and rumbles steals everything and nothing from the classic gang films that came before it.

| May 2, 2002

This is a movie so insecure about its capacity to excite that it churns up not one but two flagrantly fake thunderstorms to underscore the action.

Full Review | May 2, 2002

Contrived, awkward and filled with unintended laughs, the film shows signs that someone other than the director got into the editing room and tried to improve things by making the movie go faster.

Full Review | May 2, 2002