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| Genre: | Action |
| Year: | 1990 |
| Rating: | R |
| Length: | 1 Hour 46 Minutes |
| Country: | USA |
| Cast: | Christopher Walken, Wesley Snipes, Larry Fishburne, David Caruso, Joey Chin |
| Credits: | Directed by Abel Ferrara |
Abel Ferrara's dazzlingly lurid gangster film chronicles the downfall of a New York drug kingpin named Frank White, who is portrayed by Christopher Walken with his singular mix of spookiness, menace, and glee. White is a criminal driven by personal demons and an idiosyncratic sense of social justice. Having grown rich through his illegal exploits, White decides that he want to give something back to the city by building a multimillion-dollar hospital in an impoverished neighborhood. He attempts to do this by joining forces with a Chinatown gangster (Joey Chin), which enrages the local -- and very racist -- Mafia. Meanwhile, he's got a hotheaded cop on his back (former NYPD Blue star David Caruso) who will do anything to bring White down. Walken is electrifying in the lead role, his every utterance and gesture conveying a sense of his character's rich and twisted inner life. The film also features a hyperkinetic turn by Laurence Fishburne as White's chief henchman, and a cast of vivid minor criminals. The combination of Walken's tour de force performance; Bojan Bazelli's druggy, expressionistic cinematography; and Ferrara and screenwriter Nicholas St. John's unflinching portrayal of the city's racial and social divisions make The King of New York an incisive and poetic vision of Gotham's seething underbelly. Kryssa Schemmerling
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