Search - El Imperio (Empire - Dubbed in Spanish) on DVD

The bigger the empire, the harder the fall...

Andrew Ellington | I'm kind of everywhere | 05/07/2010

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I had high expectation for `Empire'. That is probably where I went wrong. As far as a drug fueled gangster story, this does have its high points, but overall it misses a lot of marks and comes up short too many times for me. It wants to be something more than it is capable of becoming. I take that back. It wants to be something more than it actually is, which is sad because it was capable of becoming all that it wanted to be.

Make sense?

The film tells the story of hustler Victor Rosa who makes a decent living being fairly indecent. In an attempt to solidify his safety (and procure a nice future), Victor tries his hand at more complex games only to eventually be taken for everything.

Not good.

With a cast that includes some pretty heavy hitters (Sarsgaard, Rossellini), some beautiful faces (Braga, Richards) and some charismatic talent (Leguizamo), this really should have been a slam dunk. Sadly, it fails on two opposite ends of the spectrum. As far as becoming an intelligent drama, the script lacks any real depth or polish. It feels rushed and unfocused. As far as being truly engaging and exciting, it suffers again from lack of real focus. The film doesn't really have any true intensity, and thus it loses its bite and in the end loses the audience.

The actors (outside of Leguizamo) aren't given much to build off of, which is a shame considering the talent involved. Rossellini's role is rather thankless (UGH, she is so amazing, why couldn't they have really USED her?!?!?!) and Richards and Braga are given barely anything to do other than look pretty. Richards nails her seductive nature, but she fades into shallow forgetfulness as the script disregards her. Sarsgaard actually handles his character impeccably (he is good at the shady guy) but I would have loved to know more about his character.

Yes, Leguizamo carries this movie, and actually does a stand-up job with what he is given. I just wish that he had been given a better movie to work within.

In the end, there are some themes that resonate well, they just aren't fleshed out enough. I actually found the ending effectively chilling, I just wish that it also didn't come as such a relief for me (as in, thank god this is finally over). I'm giving this a C. It has something going for it, it just doesn't understand fully how to make that something WORK for it.

I hate that this should have been so much better."