Sleepers (1997, VHS)

This is the most dangerous kind of bad movie - any isolated 4 or 5 minutes would make it look professional, tense and well-acted, but as a whole, it's dreadful.

The only good thing about "Sleepers" is the many links it provides for the Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon game.

Along with "Good Will Hunting," this movie argues the sociological premise that poverty is an excuse for being a total miscreant. The scenes in the past, before the characters grow up to be Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Ron Eldard and Billy Crudup, show some Manhattan juvenile delinquents that we're supposed to find charming because they're poor...or maybe because they'll grow up to be Brad Pitt, etc.

Following a prank gone awry, the gang is shipped to reform school, where they are tormented by the sexually abusive Kevin Bacon. Years later, Crudup and Eldard encounter Bacon in a bar and give him the killing he deserves. As luck would have it, Brad Pitt now works for the DA - so just maybe, things can be rigged so that Crudup and Eldard won't go to jail.

On the surface, the plot is: do sadistic perverts deserve to die? But it's all a repulsive hoax. Bacon is totally evil, and this being a movie, we feel good that he gets offed. So there's not much suspense.

Much of the story is about how the folks in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood rallies around the defendants to help them get away with it. In short, it presents their buddies as a sort of lowlife troupe of Amish types, helping each other out. But the guys - ashamed of being sexually victimized - never tell anyone what Kevin Bacon did. The audience knows he deserved it. But the peripheral characters have NO IDEA! Thus, all they know is their guys killed someone, and they'll be damned if they let them go to jail. Amoral vermin are fine in, say, "Reservoir Dogs," when we don't especially care what happens to the characters even if they amuse the hell out of us. But in this trash, we're supposed to root for them.

In a story that makes covering up a killing a noble gesture, it's no surprise that the script should commit other crimes - like racism, as in the scene where the black drug dealer obseqiously praises the white drug dealer for being such an honorable man. It hints at a two-tiered system of noble white criminals, and less than noble black criminals who at least can gain some points by kissing the white man's ring. And when a priest (Robert DeNiro) mulls committing perjury, we're supposed to view it as a tough moral choice - even though he has spent the rest of the movie until that point aiding and abetting lowlifes. Yes, there have been many movies associating ethnic groups with crime - but here, there's the repulsive suggestion that allowing your friends and neighbors to get away with killing someone is just a part of day-to-day Catholic life.