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Went To Coney Island On A Mission From God... Be... : Review

The Lost Boys
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Two friends searching for a third, who's fallen on hard times, spend most of this movie talking about everything except what's really bothering them: The nagging sense that they're squandering their lives. Daniel (Jon Cryer), Stan (Richard Stear) and Richie (Rafael Baez) met as kids and grew up together on the streets of New York City during the '70s, graduating high school in 1982. As an adolescent, smooth-talking Richie seemed to have it all together — he knew things about girls that dorky Daniel and Stan, whose childhood was blighted by a series of operations to repair a stunted leg, could only imagine. But Richie began drifting away from the others in high school, and after his little sister died in an accident the year following graduation, Richie simply disappeared. Ten years later, their landmark 30th birthdays looming, Stan and Daniel are treading water: Stan works at a pizza parlor, while Daniel is wasting his potential in a pawn shop. Then Stan hears that Richie's been sighted bumming around Coney Island, ragged and incoherent; he coaxes Daniel to ditch work with a catchphrase from childhood — they're "on a mission from God" — and they head for Coney to look for Richie. Stan and Daniel encounter a string of colorful eccentrics, babble about guy nonsense and eventually find their lost friend, though they don't really know what do once they have. Directed by Richard Schenkman and inspired by co-writer/co-producer Cryer's discovery that an old school friend had become homeless, this darkly humorous gabfest makes excellent use of its moody Coney Island locations, photographing them in color so wintry it's almost black and white. Cryer and Schenkman's screenplay labors under the now-common delusion that wisecracking prattle counts for characterization, but the movie ambles to a surprisingly affecting conclusion, almost despite itself. --Maitland McDonagh

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Photo courtesy Phaedra Cinema
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