PICKS & PANS

This week's reviews: 'Deuces Wild,' Lauryn Hill, A&E's 'Vegas'

Dorff (right) tries to keep Renfro (dishing it out) from going too Wild.

(PEOPLE) -- This week, PEOPLE.COM looks at street gang flick "Deuces Wild" set in the '50s, Lauryn Hill's "MTV Unplugged" and "Las Vegas" documentary on A&E.

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Movie review: 'Deuces Wild'

This cliched tale of combative Brooklyn street gangs in the late 1950s gets it so wrong in so many ways, it's almost cruel to count them. But let's just start with the fact that nearly everyone wears a black leather jacket, even though it's summer and, as one character kvetches, "It must be like 115 degrees." This kind of heavy overkill does "Deuces Wild" in long before its gangbangers start bumping each other off.

Brothers Leon (Stephen Dorff) and Bobby (Brad Renfro) are opposites. Leon, the leader of the Deuces gang, is a near-saint, protective of women and children and a regular at church. Younger Bobby is a hothead quick to use his fists. They're determined to keep their block free of drugs, which puts them in conflict with a local mob boss (Matt Dillon) and his flunky (Balthazar Getty), leader of the rival Vipers. To complicate matters, Bobby is in love with the rival gang leader's sister (Fairuza Balk), and one keeps expecting these two kids to break into West Side Story's love duet "Somewhere." If only.

Dorff at least seems sincere in what he's doing, but Renfro is all posturing and bad Brooklyn accent. Dillon's role is little more than a cameo, and he sleepwalks through it. (R)

Bottom Line: Hackneyed hoods  

Music review: 'MTV Unplugged No. 2.0'

Lauryn Hill (Columbia)

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"Fantasy is what people want, but reality is what they need. And I've just retired from the fantasy part." So proclaims a resurrected Lauryn Hill before launching into one of the 13 new songs on this intimate two-disc collection, on which she dismisses the hip-hop beats of her hallmark 1998 album "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" for austere acoustic soul. Recording during the taping of last July's MTV Unplugged concert in New York City (which premiered on MTV2 in March) the former Fugee, accompanied only by her own acoustic guitar, becomes, as she jokingly puts it, a "hip-hop folk singer."

Folk-steeped tunes such as "I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel)" -- which Hill wrote after New York City cops shot and killed an unarmed man in 1999 -- display a keen social awareness. In true coffeehouse style, she talks about the genesis of songs and offers other personal insight in jabbering interludes (one more than 12 minutes) that disrupt the flow of the record. That and the performance's technical flaws -- Hill's voice sometimes cracks, and her guitar playing is not always crisp -- may be somewhat off-putting. Even so, it only makes Hill more real.

Bottom Line: Hill climbs back strong

TV review: 'Las Vegas: The Money and the Power'

A&E (Mon., May 13, 9 p.m. ET)

If you watch "CSI" you may think you know where the bodies are buried in Las Vegas. But this muckraking documentary aims to get at the root of all evil in Sin City.

Based on the book "The Money and the Power," by Sally Denton and Roger Morris, the two-hour film depicts Las Vegas as America's "shadow capital," unofficial headquarters for a dark alliance of gamblers, gangsters and government. The material on "matinee-idol mobster" Bugsy Siegel and alleged Mafia involvement in John F. Kennedy's murder seems like old news, but the program does well to revive the memory of racket-busting Sen. Estes Kefauver and sheds needed light on the lucrative relationship between crime lords and respectable bankers.

The talking heads include journalists, professors and a wild card: John Savage, an octogenarian ex-pit boss who knows how to play it foxy. "Them are things you don't divulge," he says about mob skimming of casino cash. Then, of course, he spills a few beans.

Bottom Line: One-sided but mostly on the money