Robert Wise has been a great director in his time, but this film always looked like an elderly man's last movie and so it proved. Sadly, above all this needed sharper direction. Nearly three decades earlier, Wise shared an Oscar for West Side Story, and here it is again without the songs. The plot concerns homeless teenagers who set up squats on the rooftops of the city. The clean-cut one (Jason Gedrick) helps keep the local urchin (Alexis Cruz) out of the clutches of the murderous crack chief (Eddie Velez), for whose doe-eyed, impressively busted cousin (Troy Beyer) Gedrick falls. That's the plot and the only new element it offers is a style of fighting that involves not hitting your opponent. Beyer, a Rae Dawn Chong lookalike with lots of TV experience, really makes like she means it in the love scenes, while Gedrick looks merely embarrassed by comparison. Strange that Beyer has never made it as a big-screen black star.


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