After leaving prison, gangster Frank White announces that he will take control of the entire drug trade in New York and destroy everyone who gets in his way. New York is becoming the scene of a bloody showdown for the drug market worth more than a billion dollars.

Frank and his gang, consisting mostly of blacks, methodically destroy the bosses of Colombian, Italian and Chinese groups. At his headquarters in the luxurious apartments of the Plaza Hotel, protected by two adorable bodyguards, Frank proclaims himself the king of New York. The police, unable to deal with Frank, declare a real war on him …

4k movies reviews
The work of director Abel Ferrara cannot be assessed unambiguously, guided by some specific, clearly chosen yardstick. Filming defiantly naturalistic, tough films with a nervous atmosphere and, as a rule, uneven plot lines and multi-layered genre affiliation, Ferrara did not gain academic success, did not become a cult figure in American cinema, but remain indifferent after watching the films to which the director had his hand. impossible. Until now, Abel Ferrara remains for me one of the most beloved stage directors, one of the pioneers in the genre of a new generation of criminal action films.

The King of New York does not stray beyond the usual stylistic boundaries of the director’s previous work called The Chinese Woman and the gangster thriller The Funeral, which was shot by Ferrara a little later. The world of crime syndicates is shown in the same gloomy monotonous tones, blood is pouring like a river, gangsters do not spare patrons and their opponents, starting from the very prologue of the film, inter-clan murders, with which the film is oversaturated, seem to compete with each other in the degree of naturalism and cruelty.

Frank White (K. Walken), a cruel gangster of the old formation, returns after serving another prison term in his native New York, and with a pain in his heart begins to understand that in the place of the informal master of the city during his forced absence there is already a whole company of applicants. for whom White’s authority in the underworld is not a deterrent in attempts to sit on the throne of the king of the city. Frank White has to strengthen his shaken positions with the help of a bloody war, in which the local ambitious police officers, played by Wesley Snipes and David Caruso, who have their own plans for leadership in New York, are involved.

The plot for the director, as always, is not the main motive of his crime song, but only serves as a kind of launching moment for a spectacular immersion of the viewer into the world of mafia wars, presented without any poeticization of bandits and criminals. The servants of the law are not at all romanticized in the picture. Ferrara masterfully portrays both sides in the form of peculiar packs of wolves, engaging in a merciless fight with each other for a piece of the pie, which is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world called New York.

The story shown to us by the director, of course, is somewhat exaggerated in nature, without pretending to be a scrupulous and serious study of the world of the criminal environment and is a certain fragment constructed from the extremely clearly stated and qualitatively fit into the artistic framework of the escalation of cruelty and violence in a single city with the participation of a certain group of characters. Therefore, the cinema should be assessed accordingly, without undertaking a futile search for all the root causes of the formation of criminal communities in New York and a deep analysis of the motives of the behavior of the characters, as well as their detailed biography.

The invitation to the role of Frank White actor Christopher Walken was the director’s most successful decision. How many roles Walken outplayed such a plan and how many will play after the ‘King of New York’ (including in the aforementioned ‘Funeral’ of Abel Ferrara) – in your mind you can not count. But the trick is that, given the incredible charisma of the actor, the special mannered character inherent only in Christopher Walken, few would have coped better with the image of a real ghost man, in which everything human had died long before he returned to his hometown restore your ‘world’ order …

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (94.61 Mbps)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Audio
English: LPCM 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 2.0

Subtitles
English-PGS, English-SRT