Empire

A Bronx drug dealer (John Leguizamo) tries to go legit by cultivating the friendship of a Wall Street investment banker (Peter Sarsgaard) only to find that he’s in over his head and playing with things he can’t control. Leguizamo’s gritty performance is the film’s only asset (is there any actor working today who has done more good acting in more lousy movies?), but even he can’t make us understand why his supposedly tough, streetwise character is such a naive idiot. Otherwise, the film is shoddy and amateurish; the blood in the gunfight scenes even looks like ketchup. First-time writer and director Franc Reyes bungles both jobs: His parade of cliches never begins to add up to a story, he has no flair for dialogue, and his idea of dramatic pacing is to resort to slow motion every few minutes.