-By David Noh

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In the Dominican Republic, Luisito "La Soga" (Manny Perez) is a government hit man bent on finding the man who killed his salt-of-the-earth butcher father when he was a boy, as well as Rafa (Paul Calderon), a notorious crime lord. La Soga’s pursuit takes him to New York, leaving a trail of blood-spattered villainous drug dealers and thugs in his wake.

From almost the first frame, you can tell that La Soga, with its “Look at me!” flashy editing, general raucousness and bleached-out visuals, wants to be City of God in the worst way, and even The Godfather, in its ponderous presentation of organized crime families. It’s riddled with frenetic chase sequences which, with their rat-a-tat pacing and oh-so-predictable thunderous rap music, have an empty, synthetic urgency. Director Josh Crook, who seems like a particularly avid yet clueless tourist in the slums here, is so determined to make his film hard-hitting and grittily “real” that he seems not to have realized that he totally alienates the viewer.

This is clearly brought home during one sequence wherein a hapless woman (after being threatened with a scissors brought perilously close to her exposed breast) cowers beneath a blanket, trying unsuccessfully to evade the bullets of a break-in, which actually evoked laughter from someone at the screening I attended. An excruciating early sequence shows a live pig getting slaughtered and then eviscerated—enough to turn anyone vegan, as it indeed does La Soga. FYI: The nickname “La Soga” means “the rope,” as in the one used to strangle said unfortunate porker.

There’s a cornball romantic subplot for La Soga involving an innocent childhood sweetheart (Denise Quinones), whom he keeps in ignorance about his actual profession. The performances are mostly strictly rote affairs—lots of grimly purposeful macho strutting accompanied by five o’clock shadows and mirrored aviator shades. Crook again shows his ham-handedness with the casting of the child who plays La Soga as a little boy. The kid has such a distinctive, already mannish face that it’s completely inconceivable that he could grow up to be this very different-looking adult man. In all, the movie comes off as a vanity project for Perez, who not only stars but wrote and produced it.