FilmBlather.com

"We got invisible but well-defined boundaries here. Different lives, and no mixing."

Empire is a clumsy but competent morality play, a gangster movie more Goodfellas than Godfather, though not anywhere in the league of either. It's being pushed as the first gangster film ever told entirely from a Latino perspective, and as such it has a disarming candor: corruption is everywhere, as are real consequences for these people. The script is too giddy and contrived, and the movie isn't really believable, but it is honest and impassioned, with some surprises as well as some sure things on the acting front.

The plot is similar in many ways to last year's underrated Johnny Depp drama Blow. Victor "Vic" Roza (John Leguizamo) describes himself as "young, Latin and good-looking"; he is also very wealthy, running a self-made heroin empire on the streets of South Bronx. No Ivory Tower businessman, Vic routinely gets down and dirty, fighting never-ending territorial battles with rival dealers, one of them played with surprising proficiency by rapper Fat Joe. He has a long-time girlfriend named Carmen (Delilah Cotto), who drops the news that she is pregnant in the film's opening scenes.

Through his wife's girlfriend, he meets Jack (Peter Sarsgaard), a Wall Street investment banker who takes a liking to him and wants to do business. He offers an opportunity: a one million dollar investment that can turn into at least two, or maybe three, or four, or god knows how many. Ecstatic at this opportunity, and looking to get out of the Bronx and the drug business once and for all, he hands over the business to his second-in-command, goes to the chief of the suppliers, an obscenely rich bombshell played by Isabella Rossellini, and offers to invest a large sum of her money and guarantee a three-fold return.

I'm sure you can guess where this is going -- I pretty much scribbled the events of the third act in my notebook at about the halfway point. Empire telegraphs its plot points like nobody's business, and that combined with a story as familiar makes for a movie that isn't really suspenseful, or enlightening, or inherently interesting. If you're hoping to lean forward in your seat wondering what happens next, you will find yourself disappointed.

And yet there is enough of interest here for the movie to work anyway. First-time writer-director Franc Reyes keeps things moving, and his script is rings true in its rapid-fire profanity-laden dialogue, if not in the details of the story. The cinematography alone, gritty, drained of color, the camera occasionally executing a Chinese zoom, was enough to hold my attention.

If that's not enough for you, see it for Isabella Rossellini, absolutely phenomenal in a small role that is entirely out of character for the usually restrained actress. And if the idea of yet another rapper trying to muster up an acting career makes you nauseous, you can sleep well knowing that Fat Joe, effortlessly convincing as Vic's chief rival, may actually deserve one. John Leguizamo, who played a superficially similar role in Spike Lee's dismal Summer of Sam disappears into the role of Empire's tragic hero; he's in every scene, but he manages to keep his typical vaguely grating persona in check for the duration.

There's something to be said for a movie that succeeds, though modestly, despite shortcomings that would render most other films unwatchable. Empire really has no right to be as marginally good as it is, not with plotting this inept. The most significant thing to emerge from this isn't the Latino angle, but the fact that Leguizamo isn't just a good character actor, but an engaging leading man.