Stylish but barely mediocre overall

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The guy who made this movie is from Washington State and went to CMU for a while—apparently he never left the campus the whole time he was here. I have lived in and around Pittsburgh for 33+ years now and I promise you that NOBODY IN THIS TOWN TALKS LIKE THESE JAGOFFS. The lead character says "y'all". Seriously. Nobody in Pennsylvania anywhere (outside of Philly, but that's technically New Jersey) says "y'all". I don't even know what's up with his voice. He sounds like he's trying to talk like Matthew McConaughey, but failing hard.I knew something was awry when the opening had this hardcore gangster rap playing in the background about how murderous Pittsburgh is. So murderous... Maybe like 3 blocks of McKeesport and 2nd Street in Duquesne. And they're hardly Compton. And hookers, just randomly roaming the streets? Nope. Sorry. Maybe on Penn Ave downtown. I'm sure they tried to make a good movie, but they didn't try hard enough.

In the U.S., at least, everybody knows that the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" is in the wild boondocks of Alaska, not downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the latter state could have qualified as "the sticks" when its namesake William Penn still was alive and kicking. However, that has NOT been the case at least since the time they built a 50-story city hall topped off by the Colossus of Penn in the Steel City's eastern neighbor of brotherly love decades ago. When Alaskan transplant Sarah Palin ran in the second spot on the national ticket of America's wealthy party in its last presidential election, this movie was in production. Since Palin vociferously (and somewhat disingenuously) campaigned against boondoggles such as the "bridge to nowhere" recently built in her backyard (it partially blocked her view of Russia), these filmmakers would have had to be living under rocks NOT to know where the REAL bridge to nowhere was.A fair-minded reviewer might want to give director Blair Underwood and whoever else had a hand in naming this movie the "benefit of the doubt," and wonder if perhaps they named this flick in some sort of misguided figurative or allegorical sense. However, an examination of the facts suggests they simply don't have a leg to stand on. The concept of a "bridge to nowhere" involves the Wealthy Party's credo of stealing from the poor, to give to the rich. Projects such as bridges to nowhere epitomize the sort of flagrant misuse of public funds in order to divert them from being used to monitor the safety and quality of food, water, air, consumer products, and our environment as they are constantly "privatized" and diminished by the minions of multi-national corporations. Conversely, the movie marketed under this inapt title merely follows a handful of small-time pimps and drug dealers as they rise, fall and kill each other in a quite take-it-or-leave-it un-involving fashion.

Four friends in Pittsburgh are always trying to make some big money fast. Stumbling into running a prostitution ring the guys soon realize that they are in way over their heads and they will have to fight to keep what they have made. With narration that seems to have been lifted from a very literary novel and a sense of reality that seems to have been influenced by Hollywood this is an odd little film that seems to be neither fish nor fowl. The pieces don't really seem to fit together. Its kind of like the four friends who are the main characters, three seem like they belong together, but the fourth guy, the one who looks like an old Harpo Marx in a baseball cap and hoodie doesn't. The literary narration doesn't belong with the exploitation plot nor does the perfect sets seem to belong with the gritty nature of the story. Watch the opening party scene and try not to feel that this film little connection to reality (or how about the guys discovery of hookers on the street corner-priceless). My reservations aside, this isn't a bad movie but it is often a very silly one. Give it points for trying to be more than a typical exploitation film. At the same time its hard not to take points away for it not hitting the mark. Its not fair I know but at the same time the various bits of the film don't mesh and the over whelming feeling you're left with is a disappointment at the film not being better. Its worth a try, but I'd wait for cable or a means of seeing it that isn't going to cost you money- or too much money.

Four close friends from Pittsburgh (Danny Masterson, Ben Crowley, Daniel London, Sean Derry) meet a couple of prostitutes (Bijou Phillips and Alexandra Breckenridge), and decide to hire them to start their own prostitution service. Well, the ringleader (Brian, played by Ben Crowley) decides, and the three others seem to reluctantly go along with it. A fifth member of the gang (Thomas Ian Nicholas) stays out citing moral objections.The business plan quickly expands to involve drug dealing, which is where Ving Rhames enters the picture as the drug source. Incidentally, Rhames' part is not nearly as big as the movie poster would have you believe, amounting to a total of perhaps 20 minutes interspersed throughout the movie. Since the plot description already says this movie is about "the rise and fall" of a prostitution ring, I'm not spoiling anything by telling you that this business does indeed come crashing down in the end.This movie starts out pretty slow. Things get more enjoyable once Ving Rhames makes his first appearance, which is fairly early on, but reminds you how much you don't really care about the other characters. I was looking forward to seeing what Danny Masterson could do (you know him as Hyde on "That '70s Show"), but he was just sort of "there", playing it real cool as the level-headed one, and perhaps a little too understated to be interesting. I didn't find Ben Crowley all that convincing as the ringleader/mastermind or the junkie bad boy he transformed into, and I thought his part was too big.This movie is certainly no Hollywood blockbuster, but the effort is apparent. Many obvious cues were taken from Scarface and especially Goodfellas, eg. the ever-present voice-over narration. In the end I can say I enjoyed this movie, but only barely. The best thing I can say about it is that it's a pretty believable story, and does succeed in showing how easy it might be to make it big, as long as you're willing to sacrifice your morals and your future. Oh and Alexandra Breckenridge is very hot and fun to watch.