Cinema: Justin Pearce
MOST gangster movies these days have a rap soundtrack. Little Odessa has Russian chorales. And it’s these ponderous, bass-heavy anthems which set the tone for the film: it’s turgid.
Locating itself in the Russian Jewish neighbourhood of Brighton Beach in New York, Little Odessa suffers from a malaise not uncommon in films set among ethnic minority communities: it uses ethnicity as a sales gimmick. Who needs intrigue and wit when you’ve got interesting accents and signs in Cyrillic lettering? The result is a run-of-the-mill Mafia movie with borscht instead of pasta.
The film specialises in snowy streetscapes and stuffy, dark interiors — if you were watching it on television you’d be constantly trying to turn up the brightness. This, presumably, is meant to remind us of the grim and claustrophobic environment from which our anti-hero, Joshua (Tim Roth), is escaping by turning to a (tsk, tsk, tsk) life of crime.
Two out of 10 for originality to the film-makers, who seem oblivious to the fact that when it comes to making excuses for a boring movie, low lighting is no more effective than borscht.