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Boricua's Bond

2000, Movie, R, 105 mins

Boricua's Bond: Review

BORICUA'S BOND
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First, the good news. This passionately felt, ultimately depressing, neo-realist look at the cultural dislocation implicit in being the only white kid in a dangerous part of the South Bronx is a pretty amazing accomplishment for writer/director/co-star Val Lik, all of 20 at the time he filmed it. The bad news: It's also the work of someone whose hard-won street smarts don't preclude melodramatic moments only a 20-year-old could take seriously. The plot, episodic (and we're told loosely autobiographical) centers around Tommy (Frankie Negron), a sensitive Puerto Rican kid whose artistic talent may be his ticket out of the neighborhood, and Allen (Lik), a white kid whose divorced mother is in pretty desperate straits. Tommy befriends Allen after his homeboys repeatedly beat the crap out of him, and the rest of the film is a succession of on-location set pieces in which people get very high, insult each other a lot (the word "bitch" features prominently), have casual sex or attempt rape, and shoot each other, sometimes all in the same scene. Lik's cast is mostly made up of nonprofessional actors (there are cameos by several rap stars, including the late Big Pun) and the performances are uneven; scenes that might have played believably in the hands of pros here are as laugh-inducing as Laurence Olivier's "I haff no son!" scene in THE JAZZ SINGER. To his credit, Lik in no way romanticizes the mean streets he documents; they're about as violent and frightening as you could imagine. And, with a handful of exceptions, almost all of his characters exist on a continuum ranging from cheerfully amoral to borderline sociopathic to capital "E" evil. If this is even a reasonably accurate account of someone's real life, then we as a culture may be in worse shape than we imagine. leave a comment --Steve Simels
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