Love The Hard Way DVD (2001) (1 Disc) (UK)

Love the Hard Way, a homage to the mean streets of New York, is probably worth watching for Adrien Brodys richly nuanced performance as Jack, a petty criminal & small time hood who has a crisis of love. However, the movie as a whole, while beautifully produced & directed, has something of a crisis of identity. Love the Hard Way cant decide whether it wants to be a meditation on the rocky road to true love, or a statement about the exhilarations & risks of becoming caught up in the seedier side of life.

Juxtaposing the garbage-strewn streets of Brooklyn with the startling opulence & glamour of New Yorks ritzier hotels, Love the Hard Way follows Jack - complete with oily snakeskin coat - & his partners in crime, Charlie , hotel receptionist Jeff , Pam , & Sue , as they work a prostitution-bust scam on Asian tourists. While Jeff clues them in on the guests, Jack & Charlie, dressed as police, raid hotel rooms catching the unsuspecting guests in the act with Pam & Sue masquerading as prostitutes. In exchange for various monies, the group offers not to press charges.

Jack is also a wannabe novelist, writing in a storage bin office in between scams. But this secure, fixed world is shattered, when he meets graduate student Claire . Claire, a straight A student, is both transfixed & horrified by Jacks bent ways & unapologetic lifestyle of crime & women. But she loves him regardless, in fact she loves him so much that shes prepared to bed him on a whim & show her breasts to him at the lightest opportunity. While Claire describes her physics homework, Jack charms her with lines like Im majoring in pimping & petty blackmail.

Jack is rude, anti-establishment, & anti-social, & has grown up on the mean, gritty, urban streets, while Claire is middle-class & comes from a nice New England family. The thematic center of the story is what happens when both these totally dissimilar worlds inevitably collide. Of course, Claire ignores the advice of her best friend & continues to be seduced by Jack, only to be nastily & unceremoniously dumped by him later on. And this is where the story takes an improbable turn: Claire becomes lovelorn & obsessed, but not in a sympathetic way, & her actions are totally incongruent with her character. Rather than brushing the affair off to experience & finding a man more worthy of her, she tries to teach Jack a lesson, but at great cost to both Jack & herself.

The essential problem with Love the Hard Way is believability. The viewer is never totally convinced that a nice, respectable, & ambitious girl like Claire would fall for a man like Jack. Theres no way she would come back for more after he has stood her up, slept with other women in front of her, & then summarily rejected her. Another problem is the casting of Charlotte Ayanna who is pretty, but kind of boring & she just doesnt look quite right next to Brody. Brody, however, with his puppy-dog eyes, gives a swaggering, brash performance that is absolutely spot-on. He is totally believable as a man who has been emotionally scarred by years of street living, yet underneath hides a sensitive, perceptive soul.

Love the Hard Way is supposed to be a passionate story about two people from different worlds who hold the key to each other. They have to go through tortured hell to find common ground & are emotionally exhausted at the end. True love is only found through enormous personal adversity, an adversity that, at times, isnt that convincing. The movie is certainly worth viewing though, & watch out for a sassy & feisty Pam Greer in a small supporting role as a street-wise undercover cop who wises up to Jacks escapades. Mike Leonard March 05.