The cretins rule in “Alpha Dog,” which has much the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo or reading the latest issue of Star magazine. He lives in a ranch house big enough for the Bradys and watches a lot of TV. He has a skinny blonde named Angela (Olivia Wilde), a pit bull called Adolf and a posse of cretins.
Here the dimwitted mastermind is Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch), a pint-size nihilist with wary eyes and a face full of molting hair. By then the writer and director Nick Cassavetes was deep into “Alpha Dog,” his sexed-up, alternately funny and horrifying, heavy-panting exploitation of the crime, which, despite some name and geography changes, tracks close to the recorded facts.
Hollywood then fled the country and spent years as one of the F.B.I.’s most wanted, before being captured in Brazil in 2005. Hollywood awoke to the severity of the crime (he called his lawyer) and decided to get rid of Nicholas, who was shot multiple times and left to rot in a national forest with sweeping ocean views. Initially constrained, the hostage was soon getting stoned, drinking and watching television with his captors, who even brought him along to a party. Friends of this alpha dealer kidnapped the teenager while he was walking near his San Fernando Valley home. Hollywood, a 20-year-old fledgling marijuana kingpin, allegedly ordered the murder of the 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, whose half brother owed $1,200 for a dope debt. “Alpha Dog” is a true-crime story inspired by a pipsqueak thug improbably named Jesse James Hollywood, who once reigned over a modern Sodom and Gomorrah in - you know it - Los Angeles.