The story is horrible. Four little street kids in Hells Kitchen New York carry out a prank which misfires and sends them straight to hell without passing go or purgatory on the way. Their sentence, one year in a boys reform school is just as horrid as our worst nightmares. The four good catholic lads are mentally, physically and sexually abused by nasty young guards, lead by Kevin Bacon.

Some fourteen years later, in the neat binary order of fiction, 50 percent of the quartet have become gang members on the NY streets, and the other two have become good upstanding citizens. Jason Patric is a newspaper nobody, but filled with the essential qualities of a good guy who has been treated harshly by the sMystem. Brad Pitt is the real enigma of the four, since he has become an assistant D.A. with no qualms about throwing away his career for one glorious moment of revenge.

With pathetic predictability (even if you haven't seen the sensational advertisements) you know that the two bad boys kill Bacon, and Pitt and Patric team up in the hope that the legal system will find them innocent.

So the movie is yet another statement of the ineffectuality of the justice system. Its all very grotesque and filled with lies and cheating and stealing and indeed, all the trimmings of a John Grisham novel. There are laws and a justice system which have to be ignored since they don't work. The only way to solve anything is to take a gun into your own two hands, and hope that there is some one willing to be lie and cheat for you so that you don't
have to live by the system you have helped to destroy.

I presume the style of the film, clouded in its gloomy dark mise-en-scene is supposed to keep the audience on the edge of its seat wondering whether or not the two killers will be freed. To me, however, every scene was over played and drawn out and continually lost more credibility than the one before it.

The cast, however, is brilliant. Robert de Niro is typically fine as a gutsy and very real Catholic priest. Dustin Hoffman is a delightful old drunk lawyer, in the style of Paul Newman in The Verdict. Kevin Bacon turns out yet another deliciously sadistic villain role, and while I personally found him to be overdone, he showed no more excess than this rest of this tale of woe. Jason Patric Ļis a little too hangdog as the victim of circumstance, and Brad Pitt is ... Brad Pitt with a very strange accent that sounds more like a nasty speech impediment than something from New York. So there is no shortage of pretty faces to look at, and certainly no shortage of brilliant performances to keep you enthralled.

What the movie lacks most desperately is pace. Yes, it is a horrible, horrible story. And every step is overly sensationalized and drawn out. Certainly no one wants to see little boys raped. But how believable is it that no one makes any connection between these four lads - even though they had been best friends and of course, spent a year together up the river. We all know how the press loves to dig for juicy gossip - yet we are to believe that no one discovered anything about this ridiculously obvious scheme? Please... And are we supposed to approve of these thugs simply because the system abused them as children? What is the point of wallowing in the obiss of humanity when there is nothing in this film to bring us through to the other side?

Don't go to see Sleepers if you want to be entertained in the traditional Hollywood style. If, however, you need further proof that our society is corrupt and evil and horrible, then this is the film for you. Sleepers is a heavily weighted and overbearing morality play where the only way to fight corruption is with corruption of a different kind. It is a movie made in the style of the question "When did you stop beating your wife".