Den Of Lions
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: D Film: C
The other day, someone asked when the next Gangster films
were coming out. I said The Sopranos
had so overtaken the genre, that he should not expect any good films for a
while. It dawned on my associate that
the logic made sense, but then the idea of such films out of and/or about the
Russian Mob come up. I said Red Bear
(reviewed elsewhere on this site) was not horrible, but most such films had
been lame to date. Before I knew it,
James Bruce’s Den of Lions arrived and it is easily one of the poorest
of a long cycle of shockingly forgettable films on the subject.
Sure, some films have had Russian organized crime as
side/supporting characters, but they never work for reasons we can examine in a
minute. In this story, the government
over there asks for FBI help and they send an agent (Stephen Dorff) to go
undercover to nail a major crime boss (Bob Hoskins, playing a scene chewing Bob
Hoskins who happens to be playing a mob boss) who is out of control. The two leads are good, but Hoskins was much
more convincing as Khrushchev in playing the same ethnicity.
They are at the center of this film and that minimizes the
ethnic culture of the location, which has been a problem with most films in
this cycle. Red Bear was at
least a product of another cinema, while all we get here are tired clichés and
conventions of old American Gangster cinema.
Add the film ignoring The Cold War and the politics of Capitalism versus
Communism/Socialism and you get another work empty at the core. No film has dared to ask why and how these
criminals gained power after the fall of The Iron Curtain or bolder
questions. The one that does will be a
classic. This is not that film.
The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image exhibits detail
limits and poor video Black throughout to the point of some shots showing more
degraded images than expected. That is
odd for a resent production, but that is what you get, on top of which the
Dolby Digital 5.1 mix has surprisingly few palpable or consistent surrounds of
any kind, while dialogue is often problematic.
With no extras, this is as basic as a poor basic film on DVD can get.
- Nicholas Sheffo
