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He leaves the prison cell to enter his chic coffin-mobile, a plane looming over the hotel reflects the homecoming. White the wraith, "just a businessman," a reformer in his own mind, "a fuckin' movie star," Christopher Walken at his most iconically cadaverous. "Back from the dead" and on a mission, a city in need of cleansing, one gangland shootout at a time. His otherworldly stillness is contrasted with Laurence Fishburne's blistering bustle as the reckless underling, between them hangs the style of steely elegance streaked with hopped-up paroxysms. "Who made you judge and jury?" "Well, it's a tough job but somebody's gotta do it, you know?" Abel Ferrara's rollicking stroll through the modern necropolis, a fable of ecstatic tawdriness. A new South Bronx hospital is the dream of the philanthropic drug lord who mingles with the aristocracy as rivals are mowed down, corrupt circles atop corrupt circles. The police are a deadlocked bunch, the lieutenant (Victor Argo) slumps impotently and "Howdy Doody and the Chocolate Wonder" (David Caruso, Wesley Snipes) take the law into their own hands. "This whole system favors the scumbag!" Nosferatu beguiles hoods in the gloom of a Chinatown theater, yet The Emperor Jones bores the protagonist amid bourgeois applause. (Ariane's cameo posits another formidable point of contact, Cimino's Year of the Dragon.) Catholic icons like punctuation in a bluish haze of decay, a sinuous revel that explodes into an electric chase and leads to a solitary instance of tenderness—Caruso kissing his partner's corpse under the rain while Fishburne turns his own demise into convulsing, cackling spectacle. "Dream for a better day," goes the song, Walken's grand leopard expires in the back of a Times Square taxi in a magnificent arrangement of oozing wound, flashing siren and spent pistol. With Janet Julian, Giancarlo Esposito, Paul Calderón, Steve Buscemi, Joey Chin, and Theresa Randle.
--- Fernando F. Croce |