Ever since the death of their youngest brother Alphonse "Allie Boy" from a heroin[1][2] overdose at the hands of Marco, the leader of the Vipers, a neighboring rival street gang, they fiercely keep drugs off their turf.
On the eve of Marco's return from a three-year stint in prison, a gang war seems imminent, as the Deuces violently retaliate with suspicion against Vipers muscleman and bookie Philly, who ekes out a vacant nightclub to establish business down the block.
Marco, along with hoping to re-establish his drug-pushing enterprise, plans revenge against Leon, whom he believes ratted him out to the police for selling the killing "hot shot" to Alphonse.
Bobby falls for a new girl who moves in across the street, Annie, the uninvolved younger sister of Jimmy "Pockets", a Vipers member and heroin dealer, who takes care of their elderly dementia-ailing mother.
After jumping Deuces member Jackie in kind for the earlier attack, causing more gang fights in the neighborhood, Marco begins his activities again and allows the Vipers to rampage and terrorize residents across the block to establish his return for good.
Before leaving, Bobby drops a wheelbarrow full of cinder blocks on Fritzy's car, presumably killing him, to uphold Leon's word that "there would be no more junk on the streets".
Its loony excesses are exemplified by the casting of poor Deborah Harry as a gang member's dazed mother who has retreated into a fantasy world where it's always Christmas.
As she wobbles around her dingy, tree-decorated apartment mumbling Jingle Bells in the middle of summer, the scene seems like a Saturday Night Live spoof of kitchen-sink realism.
Here, Vincent Pastore, whose Sopranos character Big Pussy went to sleep with the fishes a while ago, is Father Aldo, a kindly but ineffectual priest whose peacemaking efforts on the mean streets of Sunset Park come to naught.
Drea DeMatteo (Adriana on The Sopranos) has altered her hair color (to brilliant blond) but not her alley-cat body language for the role of Betsy, the girlfriend of Leon (Stephen Dorff), leader of the gang known as the Deuces.
The most antiquated aspects of 'West Side Story'—minus the music and the Puerto Rican-Anglo conflict—are seen here, from the faux street-tough attitude of several attractive but dull Hollywood hunks to the unmistakable backstage look of the entire project.
"[5] Glenn Whipp of the Los Angeles Daily News said that "director Scott Kalvert shoots the fight scenes as if he were staging a literal head-bangers ball, with lots of loud music, fog machines, thunder and lightning.
We could even indulge in a little 20-20 hindsight and talk about the dubious wisdom of making a gangland movie set in 1958, about a bunch of neighborhood guys wearing cuffed jeans and white T-shirts.
[7] Marjorie Baumgarten of The Austin Chronicle said the following about the film:Like most of the rest of the participants in American culture, I get a thrill from the sight of a phalanx of Fifties rebel boys dressed in tight white T-shirts and worn-just-right dungarees.
Whether prepped for a gang fight, marking their turf, or kicking their legs in the air with the flash of a West Side Story switchblade, these cadres of midcentury boys-into-men borough teens are a staple of American iconography.
In these times, especially, they represent a kinder, gentler gangbanger of yore -- ducktailed rebels without causes, defenders of ethnic divisions and the sanctity of womanhood instead of the soulless late-century drive-by shooters and lethal errand boys of South American drug kingpins.
He just doesn't come to Brooklyn.” Director Kalvert, whose only other feature film is the period NYC gutter story Basketball Diaries, is unable to salvage anything out of this pile-up, and, in fact, adds his own inadequacies in shooting the action sequences to the mess.
The website's consensus reads: "Melodramatic and weighed down with silly dialogue, Deuces Wild is a forgettable, overheated thriller that leaves no cliche unturned.