`Illtown' Is Boring Story Of Drug Dealers/Addicts' Betrayal, Shooting It Out

Movie review X 1/2 "Illtown," with Michael Rapaport, Kevin Corrigan, Adam Trese, Lili Taylor, Tony Danza, Isaac Hayes. Directed and written by Nick Gomez. 97 minutes. Uptown. "R" - Restricted because of profanity, nudity, violence.

First shown at the 1996 New York Film Festival, Nick Gomez's "Illtown" has taken a circuitous route to theatrical release, for reasons that are now all too apparent.

In spite of a strong cast headed by Lili Taylor, Michael Rapaport, Kevin Corrigan and Adam Trese - who was so fine in "Palookaville" and Gomez's dynamic first feature, "Laws of Gravity" - it's just another boring story of drug dealers/ addicts shooting it out, betraying each other, playing Russian roulette and waking up too late to the precarious nature of their lives.

The movie's chief distinctions: a portentous visual/editing style and a pretentious verbal manner that attempts to lift the familiar material to a higher plane.

Rapaport plays a heroin pusher named Dante. Trese is an ex-con and former pal who calls himself Gabriel, though he's no angel here. After returning from prison (or hell?), he spends most of his time undermining Dante and his girlfriend Micky (Taylor), by turning the teenage kids they employ against them. Corrigan plays Dante's current business partner, Cisco, who gets the script's longest monologue.

Sample dialogue: "Money is easy, philosophy is hard." "You can't save anybody until you save yourself." "I've known him too long to trust him, you know what I mean?"

The cinematographer, Jim Denault, works overtime trying to give each scene a surreal, metaphorical kick (one critic has called the film's style "narcotic realism"). The finale, in which the rolling mounds of a golf course become a stand-in for heaven, is particularly goofy.

Tracy Granger's elliptical editing and the fractured nature of Gomez's screenplay add more confusion than complexity to the story. While they build toward a revelation of the motive behind Gabriel's destructive behavior, they neglect to provide a single reason for caring what that motivation might be.

Corrigan, Taylor and Rapaport also co-starred in last year's pointless "Kicked in the Head," one of those shoestring-budget debacles that gives independent movies a bad name.

The sense of unfortunate deja vu that comes with their collaborations is now so strong that it would be refreshing to see them cast as, say, the cannon-fodder kids in "Starship Troopers."

That's exactly the kind of out-of-context casting that makes Tony Danza so effective here. As a character known primarily as "the man," a devilish gangster who supplies Dante and Micky with their dope, he's the least predictable element in "Illtown."