Maybe if the movie had left all the expensive period artifacts, and most of the hackneyed script, on the street corner and let its capable young cast loose, Deuces Wild would have offered the audience a more interesting game.

A repellent orgy of gratuitous violence and hackneyed melodrama, Deuces Wild marks a grim nadir for everyone involved.

It not only promotes every stereotype and invokes every clich of Brooklyn lore, it combines them all into an insulting composite, fuses that to the chrome-and-fins of the pointless Fifties, and then -- weirdly -- pretends it's Shakespeare.

Scott Kalvert's attempt at a gangster picture is the worst film of 2002.