Hip-hop culture's tendency to be emulated by affluent white teenagers lies at the heart of Alpha Dog, as the film explores a group of rich, suburbanites who deal drugs and misbehave as if they had no other options. While the topic has potential, writer/director Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) gets so absorbed in portraying the day-to-day activities his characters partake in that the story never gets off the ground.

The first half of the film is spent at the home of Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch), watching him and his crew smoke weed and engage in crude humor that gets repetitious after about ten minutes. When one of Johnny's dealers, Jake (Ben Foster), fails to pay up, Johnny kidnaps Jake's younger brother and holds him as ransom. At first it's all fun and games for the kid (Anton Yelchin), who resents his dull home life and enjoys being taken to parties and shown a good time by Johnny's right hand man Frankie. It's all fun and games until Johnny finds out the legal ramifications of his action and decides that killing his hostage is more efficient than setting him free.

The film suffers from the banality of its main characters' daily routines, which are fore grounded throughout the film. Cassavetes does not seem interested in exploring why these rich, white suburbanites choose the ?gangsta? lifestyle but is content to show scene after scene of the crew partying it up. The underlying message is that unsupervised children can fall on a slippery slope that leads to real trouble. It's not insightful and tough to swallow for two hours.

Emile Hirsch is too talented of an actor to be slumming in this sort of schlock any longer, and while Timberlake gives a great performance as Frankie, he and his agents should be concerned that he is quite believable as an eighteen year old. Alpha Dog doesn't provide anything new but wallows in its attempts to create meaningful social commentary.

War Canoe Grade: D