MOVIE REVIEW : Mountain Boys Feud With Mafia in ‘Next of Kin’

In “Next of Kin” (citywide), Patrick Swayze plays Truman Gates, hillbilly cop in Chicago, hunting for the big-city Mafia varmint who killed his kin and trying to ward off the even more dangerous vendettas of his other backwoods brother, Briar (Liam Neeson).

It’s the Mafia vs. the Mountain Boys, with Fish out of Water, Feudin’ and Fussin’. This collection of marketing hooks was strung together by two writers, Michael Jenning and Jeb Stuart, who seem to have done most of their research on rural America and big city crime by watching old Walter Hill movies.

To call this story a collection of hackneyed stereotypes would be complimenting it. “Next of Kin” doesn’t have the logic of a good cliche. After a fairly good, tense opening, it keeps rolling up one preposterous scene after another: wild man Briar’s one-against-a-dozen antics as he challenges the Cosa Nostra on their own stomping grounds; lone studs swaggering into dangerous locales and challenging everybody; Michael J. Pollard’s cuddly grimaces as an inexplicably friendly hotel clerk; the Three Stooges antics of a clownish Mafia hit man; bizarrely loose-mouthed killers confessing everything over vino and tape recorders, and Truman’s unusual relationship with his classical violinist wife, Jessie--who plays fiddle in the hills and leaves the country folk rapt with wonderment.

In the long-suffering but competent cast, Baldwin is memorably nasty as the chief killer and Neeson has appropriated a set of vocal inflections that, on closer inspection, seem to be Ben Johnson’s. Director John Irvin gives it all a patina of quality, including smoky Steven Poster cinematography that suggests Vilmos Szigmond with his glasses fogged, and a pump-them-up score by Jack Nitzsche.

If this machismo-tipsy movie were a little sillier, it might qualify as a classic of dumb camp. By the end, when we discover that the feudin’ cousins and the fussin’ Cosa Nostra are all basically good old boys--or maybe “good old, good olds”--and also that you can blow away half of Chicago and stage a massacre in a graveyard without even waking up the neighbors, you may be ready to break out the moonshine or break out of the movie theater. Either one is preferable to watching “Next of Kin” (MPAA rated R for violence).