D

Franc. Reyes (yes, he actually places a period after his given name), a dancer-choreographer by trade, staged the club sequences for Brian De Palma’s “Carlito’s Way” in 1993, so maybe it’s appropriate that his debut feature as writer-director turns out to be sort of a “Scarface, Jr.”–a pale reflection of De Palma’s own 1983 overwrought reworking of the 1932 Howard Hawks gangster classic. Unfortunately, as with so many reproductions, the quality deteriorates as each one rolls off the assembly line. Hawks’ film was a stellar effort, and De Palma’s wildly overdone but still crudely powerful. “Empire,” by contrast, is merely a long string of genre cliches, crammed with obscenity-filled dialogue, tied together by a stream of dopey narration and glitzed up with lots of camera tricks and metallic cinematography. Despite an attempt to toss in a curve in the final act and a concluding twist that amounts to a cheap crib from Billy Wilder (just think “Sunset Boulevard”), it’s a puerile, predictable picture whose slick surface can’t conceal its utter hollowness.

“Empire” is the tale of a South Bronx drug dealer, a charming Latino named Victor Rosa (John Leguizamo) who–in the fashion typical of such characters–decides to go legit when the trade gets too dangerous and he winds up with prospective family responsibilities after his girlfriend Carmen (Delilah Cotto) announces that she’s pregnant. Through Carmen’s unlikely friend Trish (Denise Richards), Victor is introduced to Jack Wimmer (Peter Sarsgaard), a whiz-kid Wall Street investment banker who takes an even more unlikely shine to Victor. Our loquacious hero, who’s patiently explaining everything to us in a floridly street-wise narration, gets a mite too avaricious, however, and in order to make a big “guaranteed” score borrows a stake from his supplier La Colombiana (Isabella Rossellini) and her suave henchman Rafael (Nestor Serrano)–which leaves him holding the bag when the deal goes sour because Wimmer isn’t quite what he seems. There’s a subplot involving Jimmy (Vincent Laresca), the lieutenant to whom Victor bequeaths his gang leadership, whose impetuosity threatens to escalate a turf war among dealers that endangers La Colombiana’s profits. (That part of the story allows Reyes to stage a few colorful gun battles that seem like little more than cadenzas designed to inject the necessary quotient of action into what’s actually a very stolid, talky tale.)

The aspirations of “Empire” are actually pretty lofty. Reyes wants the picture to say something about the capitalistic mentality that animates Americans at both ends of the socio-economic spectrum, and to pose the question whether cutthroat financiers might not be guilty of greater wrongdoing than the lower-level thugs who sell dope on the streets. But ultimately that higher sort of concern gets lost in a plot that ultimately makes little sense, the welter of foul language, pointlessly ostentatious music video-style visuals, gangster-movie cliches and unappetizing characterizations. This is yet another of those movies in which the occurrence of the “F” and “MF” words is so pervasive that if all of them were systematically excised, the remnant probably wouldn’t even reach feature length; in which the camera flourishes call attention to themselves without distracting us from the script weaknesses they’re meant to camouflage; and in which, when the inevitable rift between Victor and Carmen rolls around (she’s backed up by an overly-possessive mother, of course) and the guy is then found by the girl in a compromising position with another women, one can only chortle that such old devices are being trotted out in a picture that wants to seem so hip. When one calculates the convolutions that the scheme central to the outcome entails, moreover, the whole thing becomes not merely implausible but preposterous. The truly fatal flaw in “Empire,” however, is the fact that all the characters are thoroughly unlikable. We’re apparently supposed to identify with Victor, but despite Leguizamo’s ingratiating smile, he’s as much of a money-grubbing sleazebag as anyone else in the movie, and equally capable of ugly violence. In fact the story boasts a roster of crumbs so complete that though most of the major characters bite the dust by the time the final credits roll, it’s difficult to care in the least–except in one instance, when an innocent catches a stray bullet.

None of the cast fare well here. Leguizamo has been striving for screen recognition ever since “Super Mario Bros.,” but thus far nothing has worked for him; in this case he lays on the cheeky machismo and surface charisma all too thick. Sarsgaard’s an excellent young actor (he was superb in “Boys Don’t Cry” and very good in “The Center of the World”), but he’s nearly as bland here as he was in “K-19: The Widowmaker.” (Maybe big-budget studio productions don’t agree with him.) Richards does the sexy babe routine adequately, but Cotto is simply pouty; Laresca, meanwhile, does what he can with a stock part that might as well require a sign reading “dead meat” to appear on his character’s first appearance. What Braga and Rossellini are doing in such caricatured roles is beyond comprehension.

“Empire” has a lot in common with Charles Stone III’s recent flick “Paid in Full.” Both recount the doom-laden lives of friends who briefly enjoy the profits of the drug trade but then suffer from its pitfalls. There are cosmetic differences, of course. Stone’s picture was a period piece, and a gritty one at that, while Reyes’ is contemporary (or nearly so: the idea of big Wall Street profits seems a trifle out-of-date) and much, much slicker. The biggest difference, though, is that “Paid in Full” was basically a cautionary tale–not a fully successful one, to be sure, but a film that at least tried to tag a message onto its story of woe. “Empire,” by contrast, is just glibly cynical; its only point seems to be “Be careful whose money you steal,” and it revels in portraying revenge as a matter-of-fate thing. It’s just a piece of flashy trash, disheartening in terms of both its empty cinematic pizzazz and its calculated amorality.