MOVIE REVIEW : ‘King of New York’: Hypocritical but Stylish

Abel Ferrara, director of “King of New York,” is a virtuoso of grunge. He may not have all the equipment necessary to make a great movie--he’s not real big on narrative, logic, believability, human empathy--but he sure knows how to shoot the cinematic works.

In technical terms, “King of New York” (citywide) is his most stylish job yet. In emotional terms, it’s as aggressively wacked out as such earlier opuses as “Ms. 45” and “Fear City.”

Christopher Walken plays Frank White, a feared New York crime lord who, at the start of the film, is released from prison after five years in stir. Detention has inflamed his do-gooder’s soul: He plans to strong-arm the city’s drug lords into redistributing their booty to the poor.

In effect, Ferrara, and his frequent scriptwriter Nicholas St. John, are running the same game as Frank. Their morality play is at the service of great gobs of mayhem; the do-goodism is camouflaged by a hail of bullets. It’s a time-honored Hollywood strategy--decry violence by showing lots and lots of it.

In “King of New York,” the strategy is more hypocritical than usual because Ferrara’s filmmaker’s instincts are so clearly on the side of the mayhem. His expository, nonviolent sequences lack a virtuosic charge, which is perhaps why there are so few of them; Ferrara juices everything in sight, as if boredom was the worst crime a filmmaker could commit.

In the process of not boring us, Ferrara stages scenes of surpassing lunacy. What gives the film its demented distinction is that the lunacy seems to be seriously, almost feverishly intended. When, as an evening’s light entertainment, a rival gang lord screens Murnau’s silent horror film “Nosferatu” for his henchman, or when we watch Frank and his goons and the city’s hoi polloi attend an experimental-looking production of O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” we’re in cuckooland.

The gangland scenes shamelessly exploit urban fears: Frank’s drug runners, led by Larry Fishburne’s Jimmy Jump, are mostly black, inner-city monsters who groove to their own psychoses. Ferrara, however, is an equal-opportunity employer; the Italians and Chinese and Colombians don’t come across any better, although they don’t lend themselves to as many garish photo opportunities.

In a strange sort of way, Ferrara and St. John’s exploitation fantasy is socially conscious; the rage of his victimized minorities in “King of New York” (rated R) functions as a form of payback to genteel white society. Even Frank gets off the hook. “I’m not your problem,” he tells the dogged policeman (Victor Argo) on his trail. “I’m just a businessman.’

Christopher Walken is the ideal actor for Ferrara because he combines an ultra-scary stolidness with balletic grace. Sometimes the camera dotes on him as a sculptural presence; at other times it glides along with him as he erupts in flourishes of free-style violence.

We’re supposed to recognize how Frank’s good and bad impulses co-exist within the same warring soul. He has his counterpart in David Caruso’s Gilley, a cop so maddened by Frank’s successes that he resorts to lawlessness in order to ice him. Although Gilley is one of the “good guys,” there’s the suggestion that his rage at Frank is motivated by more than righteousness--that, in attempting to eliminate Frank, Gilley is trying to expunge his own murderous potential.

The thin line between cops and crooks is a timeworn theme in crime movies, but Caruso gives it a psychological edge that “King of New York” desperately needs. Without that edge, the film, with all its high-style bloodletting, is just too mindlessly fancy.

‘KING OF NEW YORK’

A Seven Arts production of a New Line Cinema release. Executive producers Jay Julien and Vittorio Squillante. Producer Mary Kane. Director Abel Ferrara. Screenplay Nicholas St. John. Cinematography Bojan Bazelli. Music Joe Delia. Production design Alex Tavoularis. Costumes Carol Ramsey. Film editor Anthony Redman. With Christopher Walken, David Caruso, Larry Fishburne, Victor Argo, Wesley Snipes, Janet Julian.

Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (explicit violence and sex and strong language).