Have you ever wanted to like something, but no matter how hard you tried you just couldn’t? That’s how I felt about Sleepers, the Barry Levinson directed story about child abuse and revenge.

Here’s Sleepers in a nutshell: Four New York City youths do something stupid, end up in a juvenile detention center, and are repeatedly raped in the ass. They grow up into adults who resent having been raped in the aforementioned orifice. A bad courtroom drama ensues. And by bad courtroom drama, we’re talking not all that much drama and only a bit of courtroom, but more bad than you can shake a security guard’s penis at. This dramatic tale of ass rape and inconceivably absurd plot twists falls as flat on its face as, well, a juvenile delinquent pushed face down for an ass raping.

The first problem is that the film doesn’t know what it wants to be. I think it’s meant to be a commentary on anal rape and how it impacts young minds (not to mention young asses). The film is, after all, laden with tunnel imagery, dark and ominous passages that never, ever lead someplace good. But no, that’s not quite what it wants to be. Sleepers may intend to be a story about redempti… Nah. Nevermind. There is no redemption to be found here. Maybe it wants to be a movie about revenge? Possibly. But one would figure a film about revenge would, oh, I don’t know, make us care about seeing the revenge take place. Sleepers doesn’t manage to make us care. About much of anything, really.

What Sleepers does manage to do is provide a great checklist of how not to do several film genres.

Want to wax nostalgic about life in 1960s New York City? Don’t do it like this. Levinson tries hard (too hard, really), but never quite captures the spirit necessary to evoke a “period” feel. Hope to tell a coming of age tale showing the camaraderie that exists between teenage boys? This is how not to do it. These kids are bland and unlikable; who wants to remember their boyhood like that? Want to make a revenge film? Not like this you don’t. If you can’t at least make us care about the characters, at least make the revenge itself interesting. Sleepers can’t even manage that.

So then we come to the ass rape.

A film that is essentially about anal rape doesn’t even get that right.

Overblown. Heavy-handed. Melodramatic. Levinson tries so damn hard to show us how awful it must be to have a juvie guard’s penis in your ass, we descend into near parody rather than an honest look at the trauma of child abuse. A total and complete waste of what could have been strong dramatic material.

But at least the acting is good, right? After all, look at that cast: Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, Minnie Driver. You really can’t go wrong with a lineup like that … right?

Sorry, no dice. Hoffman is the only guy who manages to pull a good performance out of the mess that is this script – and all of his scenes come late in the film, during the utterly awful courtroom sequences. To be fair, Pitt manages to mine some gold with what he’s given, too, coming across as a vibrant, aggressive young attorney with a hidden and traumatizing past. But all in all, this star-studded cast is wasted.

Speaking of the courtroom scenes: There’s bad, and there’s bad. These segments of the story wouldn’t even be good enough to make the outtakes of Law & Order: East Podunk, Illinois. Simply dreadful. Worst was the sequence when one of the ass rapists (yes, the following is going to be a spoiler. And no, you really shouldn’t care about reading it … but you’re warned anyway), in courtroom proceedings unrelated to his ass raping, for no discernable reason beyond Levinson’s desire to have a “dramatic” moment, decides to admit in court that he did indeed rape young ass many years before. Drama ensues. Etc., etc.

Ugh. I need a bath.

Disc Presentation
As if the film wasn’t bad enough, Sleepers comes on a “flipper” (i.e., two-sided) disc. Points off already right off the bat. As for the rest of it? Well, it’s not as if you should be buying this anyway. But I digress …

Sound and picture quality are both just fine. As a film it does very little to visually impress, so it wasn’t as if this was going to be testing the limits of your HDTV anyway, but the early sequences are suitably warm and fuzzy, and the middle sequences are washed out in the intended manner. The latter portions of the film fare a bit worse; they are not very well lit, look very muddy, and have blacks that are closer to a very dark brown. Whether or not this was the intended effect, I do not know, but it sure looked ugly.

The sound fares better; it does the job in a workmanlike fashion. Dialogue is always clear, sound effects sound fine. The overblown, over the top, subtle-as-a-jackhammer John Williams score sounds rich and is well mixed – though it’s as heavy-handed as anything he’s ever done, often inappropriate, and at times cringe-inducing (especially in the film’s final scenes).

Disc Extras
I'm an extras hound. I love DVD extras and will buy films I otherwise might have skipped if they have really spectactular extras. Well, I am pleased to report that the extras on Sleepers are just as spectactular as the film itself. We get glorious text on the cast and production notes, also presented in glorious, high definition text. Oh, and the film flash feature is AMAZING. When you select “film flash” on the main menu, a screen comes up that says, “If you liked Sleepers we recommend these movies. Pictured below are VHS sleeves for four movies. And there is a trailer to round it all off. WOW! Warner Brothers has hit a home run with this release.

The Bottom Line
No, Sleepers is not the worst film ever made. A great deal of my disappointment comes not from this being out-and-out terrible, but because there is so much wasted potential. Opportunities for real drama, real characterization and real questions with real moral complexity are missed each and every time. What we get is overly obvious, way too heavy-handed and lacking in people we can sympathize with. That’s too bad.

Don’t waste your money. And don’t drop the soap.