King of New York (1990)

Official trailer

A Gangster Film With No Heroes

King of New York is a crime film with no one to root for. The drug lord at its center is a murderer who talks about saving the poor. The cops chasing him decide to become killers themselves when the law fails.

Everyone in it is compromised, and the film watches them all with the same cool, absorbed eye. It’s violent and bleak, and it’s also strangely beautiful, a nighttime New York of limousines, neon, rain and blood.

Abel Ferrara directed it from a script by Nicholas St. John, and it opened in 1990 to poor box office and mixed reviews. Over the following years it built a cult reputation, especially among hip-hop artists and fans of independent crime cinema. My rating is an 8. It’s uneven and sometimes sloppy, and Walken’s performance makes it unforgettable.

I’d put Walken’s Frank White up against any gangster the movies have produced, and I’d follow him through a much worse film than this one.

The movie around him frustrates me. It’s messy, it drops threads, and at times it looks as if Ferrara lost track of his own story in the edit. Then Walken glides into a room and none of that matters to me.

Frank White

Walken plays Frank White, a drug kingpin released from prison at Sing Sing after years inside. He returns to New York in a limousine, checks into the Plaza Hotel, gathers his old crew and sets about reclaiming the drug trade from the gangs that divided it while he was away. He’s calm, polite, softly spoken and utterly ruthless, and he kills his rivals one by one, often in person.

Frank also has a vision. He wants to use his drug money to save a hospital in the South Bronx that the city is about to close, and he talks about giving back to the community he came from. He believes in it, and he’s financing it with the trade that’s destroying the same neighborhoods. The contradiction is the film’s central question, and it never resolves it.

Walken gives one of the defining performances of his career.

His Frank is ghostly, elegant and unpredictable, a man who dances at parties, quotes his ambitions to politicians and executes people without raising his voice. Nobody else could have played him. Walken’s strange rhythms and sudden stillness make Frank feel as if he’s drifting through the world a few inches above everyone else.

Jimmy Jump

Laurence Fishburne plays Jimmy Jump, Frank’s most loyal and most volatile soldier, and he’s electrifying. Jimmy laughs, dances, jokes and kills with manic energy, and every scene he’s in explodes with life. He’s the opposite of Frank’s stillness, and together they make one of the great partnerships in any crime film. Jimmy would die for Frank, and the film makes that loyalty feel both touching and terrifying.

Fishburne wasn’t yet the star he would become after Boyz n the Hood and The Matrix, and this performance shows why he got there. His final scene, a wild shootout on the streets, is among the most memorable deaths in any gangster film, played with a mixture of defiance and joy. He laughs at the police as they close in, and he goes down fighting.

Fishburne nearly steals the picture. Jimmy Jump is the character I’d happily watch a whole second film about, and his death scene is the moment I’d point to when someone asks why this rates an 8 despite the mess. Ferrara gets out of the way and lets an actor laugh at the police as they close in, and it’s thrilling.

Frank’s crew is a vivid collection of young actors who went on to bigger things, including Steve Buscemi as a drug chemist and Giancarlo Esposito as one of Frank’s men. The film’s casting was ahead of its time. Watching it now is like seeing a preview of the next decade of American crime cinema, gathered in a single penthouse.

The Cops

The detectives pursuing Frank are frustrated beyond endurance. Bishop, their weary commander, played by Victor Argo, has watched the courts free men like Frank again and again. Two younger cops, played by David Caruso and Wesley Snipes, decide the only way to stop him is to kill him, and they plan an off-the-books execution.

The film treats their decision with the same moral ambiguity as Frank’s, and it never lets the audience feel comfortable with either side. The cops are men who have given up on the law and become the thing they hate, and their plan goes horribly wrong. Caruso and Snipes both make strong impressions, and Snipes, in particular, was about to become a major star.

I think the script sells the rogue-cop plot short. Caruso and Snipes are good, and the idea of cops turning executioner is strong, but their plan comes together in a handful of scenes and I never felt the weight of what they were deciding to do. Give that thread ten more minutes and the film’s moral argument hits a lot harder.

The film’s refusal to side with the police made it controversial in 1990. It’s one of the reasons it has aged so well: its cynicism about institutions feels more modern than most crime films of its era. It anticipated a wave of nineties films that treated cops and criminals as mirror images of each other.

The Violence

The violence in King of New York is extreme, and Ferrara stages it in sudden, chaotic bursts. Frank’s crew walks into rival gangs’ headquarters and opens fire. A deal in a Chinese restaurant ends in slaughter. The killings are shocking because they come without warning, and they’re shot with a rough, messy realism.

The most famous sequence is a car chase and shootout in the rain, as the cops ambush Frank’s limousine on a highway at night.

The rain, the headlights, the gunfire, the spinning tires and the crashing cars make it as jolting as any action scene of the period, shot with raw urgency. Ferrara isn’t a polished action director. That roughness gives his violence its power.

That shootout is terrific. It’s ugly and confused and loud, and I believe every second of it in a way I rarely believe the slicker action of the period.

New York at Night

Ferrara loved New York, and the film is a portrait of the city at its most dangerous and glamorous. Frank’s world stretches from the penthouse suites of the Plaza to the crack houses of the Bronx, and the film moves between them fluidly, as if the whole city is one continuous nightclub.

Bojan Bazelli’s cinematography gives the film a rich, dark look, full of blue night light, neon and shadows, and the city feels like a character. The film captures a particular moment in New York’s history, the late eighties, when the crack epidemic, crime and wealth all collided, and it remains a powerful snapshot of that time, made on the streets it depicts.

The soundtrack mixes hip-hop with a moody score by Joe Delia, and the music gives the film a street-level energy that set it apart from the polished gangster films of the period. Schoolly D’s music in particular gives Frank’s crew a swagger that no orchestral score could match.

Abel Ferrara and Walken

Ferrara spent most of his early career making raw, provocative films about New York, from the revenge thriller Ms. 45 to China Girl. King of New York was his biggest production to that point, and it led directly to Bad Lieutenant in 1992, his most famous film, with Harvey Keitel as a corrupt, self-destroying cop.

Walken became one of Ferrara’s key collaborators. He returned for The Addiction, a vampire film set among philosophy students, and The Funeral, a period gangster drama, and both roles share Frank White’s eerie calm. Together, the director and the actor made some of the strangest American crime films of the nineties, and King of New York is where the partnership began in earnest, with Walken at the peak of his strange, magnetic powers.

The Hip-Hop Connection

Hip-hop artists made up a devoted audience for King of New York, and they admired Frank White’s style, his defiance and his image as a king rising from the streets. The Notorious B.I.G. referred to himself as Frank White and called himself the King of New York, borrowing the character’s image for his own legend, and the film has been referenced in countless songs since.

That connection helped keep the film alive during years when critics ignored it, and it brought it to new generations of viewers. It’s one of the rare films whose reputation was built largely by musicians, and it shows that cult status often comes from unexpected places. A film that critics shrugged at in 1990 is now quoted, sampled and studied.

Gridlock in Times Square

In the final scene, Frank, wounded, escapes in a taxi as the police close in. The cab gets stuck in traffic in Times Square, surrounded by police cars, and Frank sits quietly in the back seat, bleeding, his gun resting on his lap. The final moments are silent, eerie and ambiguous, and few crime films end as hauntingly.

It’s a perfect image for the character: the king of New York, trapped in the middle of the city he tried to own, surrounded by lights and noise and completely alone. Walken plays it with an almost serene calm, as if Frank has made his peace with whatever comes, and the film ends without explanation, leaving the audience to decide what it all meant.

Many viewers find the ending frustrating at first, and it grows more powerful on repeat viewings. It’s the kind of conclusion that only a director confident in his vision would dare. Ferrara trusts the image of Frank in the back of the cab to say everything, and it does.

The ending is the thing I’d keep if I could keep only one piece of this film. Frank bleeding in the back of a cab, going nowhere in the middle of the city he wanted to own, says more about him than any speech the script gives him.

Where It Falls Short

It’s an uneven film. Some of the plotting is confused, the script sketches several characters thinly, and it raises its ideas about Frank’s hospital more than it explores them.

Ferrara’s direction can be sloppy, and the pacing sags in places, especially in the middle. A few scenes feel like they were cut short or rearranged in the edit, and the story occasionally skips over steps the audience needs.

Its moral ambiguity also frustrates some viewers. The film refuses to judge Frank or the cops, and it can feel as if it’s simply enjoying the violence. That’s part of its power, and it’s also why it’s not for everyone. Viewers who want a clear moral compass should look elsewhere.

It gets an 8. Watch it for Walken, for Fishburne and for the rain-soaked, neon-lit New York it captures, and be ready for something darker and stranger than the average gangster film. It’s closer to a nightmare than a morality tale, and it lingers like one.

Craft Note

The Verdict on King of New York

It’s an 8, and Walken supplies most of it by himself. Fishburne, the rain-soaked shootout and that cab in Times Square supply the rest.

What keeps it from a 9 is Ferrara’s sloppiness: the thin characters, the sagging middle and a hospital subplot the script raises and then forgets. I’d forgive a director almost anything for a performance like Walken’s, and this film asks me to forgive a fair amount.

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