Jersey Bred (2024) Film Review
There’s a certain appeal that crime movies should accomplish in order to set themselves apart from the rest. Otherwise, we’re looking at centuries of storytelling, both fictional and factual, that works under the same standards and rules. Crime doesn’t pay, and usually, a life lesson is to be learned when a lead character goes through the daunting journey of a crime gone wrong. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese have built a career out of the offshoots of this premise, and yes, they still have it in themselves to keep recycling a human element that’s often found in the underworld of crime.
But some filmmakers haven’t exactly been able to pinpoint the original aspect of the stories, and they must work with what they have. It could be a true story that still hasn’t been told in a movie. Or, like in the case of Jersey Bred, you could take a whole culture, mash it into a puree, and come up with a story that doesn’t exactly follow logic but has a moral that should be part of crime movies.
In any case, there’s no reason for movies of this nature to be uninteresting. Jersey Bred complies with the rules of the gangster movie but fails to build compelling characters that we can identify with. The lesson is there for the audience to absorb, but the essential element of engagement is difficult to attain when there’s not a single likable person in this fable.
The film is entirely about disruption. Vincent Napolitano is a computer wiz who also happens to be a prince in the New Jersey mob. His ambitious views include changing the game in the mob dynamics that his family, friends, and enemies have followed since the dawn of the operation. Online gambling is the system, and it intends to incorporate every aspect of technology into an operation that doesn’t get expanded enough to see if it’s right or wrong.
The problem is that Napolitano is forced to face old and new enemies. The new leaders and the old ones are strong contenders that will follow through on every option to make Napolitano’s idea tumble down. Oh yeah, and the police are a narrative device that only works for exposition and nothing more.
Jersey Bred is a work of passion by Greg Russo, a director whose debut feels too limited to his own ideas about the culture he’s trying to portray. The film should have less style and more substance. The story is simple and predictable, and while the ending provides a good turnaround, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before.
Nevertheless, the style is faithful enough to make for an entire movie. A movie that has weird moments of effective humor and a depiction of mob culture that feels eerily real. Jersey Bred is good in that aspect, and it should deserve Russo some recognition for his attempt to tell an engaging story set in the underworld of modern mafia. Crime doesn’t pay, and at least that’s a message that arrives loud and clear with Russo’s debut of a crime drama that will work as a business presentation for something in the future that will hopefully be better written.
