Review of Yards, The

Introduction

The Yards enters the crowded arena of crime thrillers, and features a high profile cast including Mark Wahlberg, James Caan and Joaquin Phoenix.

Wahlberg plays Leo Handler, a car thief who took the fall for his mates and went to prison. Now he`s been released and wants to get his life in order. His Uncle Frank offers him a legitimate job, but concerned about the length of training - and therefore being unable to support his ill mother, he decides to work elsewhere in the business with old friend Willie (Phoenix). Drawn into the work of civic corruption and sabotage, Leo finds himself in great danger of going back to prison, especially after an evening`s sabotage goes wrong with deadly consequences...

Video

Video comes in 2:35:1 anamorphic widescreen and is of a pretty good standard throughout the film. There is no sign of dirt or grain on the print, which remains clear and crisp - even during the potentially troublesome nigh time scenes.

Visually, the film looks excellent, with good locations in New York - from the rail yards, to the run-down apartment where Wahlberg`s character lives, to the up-market residence of Caan`s character.

Audio

The sound comes in Dolby Digital 5.1 and is of above average quality, although nothing to shout home about.

Minimal use if made of the rear channels, with the majority of the soundtrack coming from the front stereo pair and the centre channel.

The sound effects are good, but there was a noticeable lack of music, which could have helped to create more atmosphere in some scenes.

The dialogue was clear and understandable throughout the film.

Features

The extras consist of a director`s commentary, a behind-the-scenes featurette, trailer, making-of featurette and interviews.

The two eleven minute featurettes promise much, but fail to deliver - the making-of starts off well, but degenerates into a back-slapping exercise providing nothing of interest and concentrates on the various stars telling us how good the director was. The making-of is not much better and contains numerous un-narrated "camcorder" shots from behind the camera during the shooting of several scenes. These clips are often only seconds long and are separated by fade-outs - this became so annoying that I didn`t bother watching it all!

The interviews don`t offer much that wasn`t in the behind-the-scenes featurette and contain more backslapping. These interviews also suffer from having too many short clips separated by fade-outs.

Conclusion

Overall, this film has a good story, is very well made and very well acted - but is inherently uninteresting - mainly because the characters didn`t inspire me to have an interest in them or any sympathy for them. One of the interviewees says that one of the virtues of the film was that it has no defined good guys and bad guys - this is perhaps a problem rather than a feature.

The cast is excellent, and all concerned turn in excellent performances - Wahlberg manages to survive without George Cluny in the cast and plays his part well, with James Caan, Charlize Theron and Joaquin Phoenix all very good in their supporting roles.

Good video and reasonable sound are let down by the extras - there is a director`s commentary, but the other extras don`t deliver on their promise and aren`t really worth watching.

Overall, this is one that is worth renting out, but I`d hesitate to recommend that you buy it - there are many other crime thrillers on the market that will involve and excite you more than this one - a shame because the strong cast has the potential to turn out an excellent movie.