There isn't a lot of violence as far as mob movies go. There's a beating and Eddie's death by acid and a throat-slitting, but there are no shotgun blasts or bullet-spewing machine-gun firefights or broken kneecaps. The bleak atmosphere and drama are achieved through the tension between the poor neighborhood from which Mike(our protagonist, though I submit he's no hero) comes and the affluent, yuppie college world of which he so desperately wants to be a part. No one is particularly likeable here. The ostensible hero is a whiny, emo candyass who winds up working for the mob in order to pay his tuition. He displays the common sense of a turnip by agreeing to ferry packages to Oyster Bay for $0,000 a week. He cheats on his nagging, stereotypically Brooklyn girlfriend with an upper-middle-class Manhattan brat who thinks nothing of spending summers in Italy. He protests the repossession of a television from a poor family, but doesn't actually refuse to participate in said repossession. When Nicky Shades(Eddie) bursts into the car service with a gun and threatens to kill the mob boss for ruining his neighborhood, Mike sides with the mobsters and talks the high, desperate, broken-hearted Nicky down, effectively ensuring his ugly demise. When Nicky is cornered by the mobsters in a dark alley, our resident genius points him out to his pursuers and then sits uselessly in the car until he hears Nicky scream, at which point, he grabs a gun, leaps from the car, and rushes into the alley, only to discover that Nicky has been doused in acid and is dying a slow, agonizing death. Nicky begs him to "help him go," and he obliges by putting a bullet in his head. He does not, however, shoot Nicky's killer, despite a lot of gun-waving and crying and empty threats. I know I was supposed to like and pity Mike, but I couldn't. If you truly care for your friend, you don't drive the mobsters around the neighborhood looking for him, nor do you point him out to his killers. You don't wait in the car while they pour acid on his face. You don't scream empty threats. You use the gun to put a bullet in both mobsters, and if you're too late to save your friend, you put a bullet into his murder's face. Mike is keen on being hard done by but seldom accepts his responsibility for the choices he made. He could've refused the Oyster Bay runs, could've let Lou refuse to give Nicky a job, could've chosen a less expensive college. But he wanted to be the Big Damn Hero and have it all exactly how and when he wanted it. Just because you have a dream, that doesn't guarantee you the right to attain it in the flashiest manner possible, or at all. I don't really blame him for getting Nicky a job at the car service; he was just trying to do a good turn for a childhood friend. I do blame him for siding with the mobsters when Nicky burst in with a gun. Had he sided with Nicky and shot the mobsters, Nicky might have survived. He chose to side with the money, and it cost Nicky his life. And poor Nicky. What a mess. He came back from the war with a bad leg and a vicious heroin addiction. He comes home with a head full of disillusionment to discover that the neighborhood he'd been fighting for had been corrupted by the mob. He'd gone from a local hero who was going to make it out to a hired thug repossessing televisions in front of crying children. It's interesting to note that while he has no compunction about upsetting the children by taking the television("Trust me, when I kicked in doors in Fallujah, they lost a lot more than a fuckin' TV"), he's disgusted when he sees the repossessed TV tossed carelessly behind the car service, its screen cracked. "Look at that," he says. "What a fuckin' waste. Fuckin' Lou, ruinin' the goddamn neighborhood." He was happy to repossess the television when he thought it would be re-rented, but once he realized the mobsters had taken the television because they could, he was bitter and disgusted. If you were a pointy-headed swot with an analysis kink, you could claim that the television repossession was a metaphor for his service in Afghanistan. By far the most poignant scene in the movie is the one in which he injects heroin between his toes while Mike watches and his pregnant girlfriend sleeps. "Don't you think you should stop before the kid comes? You survived. You made it back. You don't want to die here. Sal says that when you die in Brooklyn, God says fuck you." "God already told me 'fuck you," Nicky says, and injects the heroin between his toes just as his heavily-pregnant girlfriend waddles into the living room. "Take our picture," he tells Mike the aspiring photographer. "Isn't she beautiful? Look at that big belly. G'on, take our picture, Mike. We can show it to the kid someday. Mike takes the picture while a very high Nicky kisses his tired girlfriend. Nicky is so wrecked, so damaged, and you know you should be disgusted by his addiction, but Eddie imbues the scene with such an old, delirious tenderness and fragile optimism that you can't help but ache for all of them. For Mike, who sees what his childhood friend and idol has become, for Luz, the pregnant girlfriend, who's stopped asking about his habit, and for Nicky, who's trying so hard to forget. I'm still not sure why Nicky burst into the mob boss' lair with a gun. He was obviously high, but I think he was motivated by regret, self-loathing, and fear for his unborn child. If the neighborhood was this bad now, how bad would it be when his child was born? I think he was trying to atone for his involvement in the television repossession. He was tired of being used to do other people's dirty work. "You wanted to be me? I wanted to be you, so do it, Mike. Do it. Please, Mike. Please?" he begs when Mike threatens to shoot him. In a twisted way, he was trying to do right by his child. He couldn't shake the smack, but he could try to make his neighborhood a little safer. Unfortunately, he can't bring himself to shoot before Mike sides with the mobsters, and so it's the beginning of the end for him.