Review by Jane Freebury
Early in Dinner Rush a man is gunned down in the street. When this happens and when so many movie elements are slick, handsome and intelligently written there’s the danger it will move into a warehouse and Reservoir Dogs territory. But Dinner Rush takes place in a busy restaurant.
From the very start Dinner Rush looked like it was going to be interesting. A few deft strokes with slow-motion, long shots out-of-focus, and searching camera movements got things off to a good start, and then the questions presented themselves. Where is it all going? How are these people connected? Isn’t someone going to punch that appalling art buff/gallery owner in the nose? Please?
It’s an Italian trattoria that attracts customers from all walks of New York life. Not for the sauteed spicy sausage and sliced capsicum that restaurant owner Louis (Danny Aiello) enjoys but for the nouvelle cuisine that his chef son Udo (Edoardo Ballerini) whips up with his team below stairs. Cuisine preferences are not the only things father and son disagree about.
Udo’s flair with food is famous and his customers are quite prepared to book three months in advance, but when a food critic (Sandra Bernhard) arrives to sample the fare, everything that leaves his kitchen must be perfect, even more perfect than usual. Two thugs from Queens arrive, resplendent in their gold chains and awesome in their bulk, and curiously they meet with similar attentiveness, and an NYPD detective also gets this treatment. Other individuals seem to receive special attention from the camera, but you don’t know why until Dinner Rush comes together, impeccably, like Udo’s lobster tails on deep fried spaghetti.
This is only director Bob Giraldi’s second feature film, but he has 2,500 TV commercials to his credit. This and the fact that he is also a successful restauranteur certainly shows. The camera swoops and pans around all the frenetic dinner rush activity, hitching a ride on a platter here, scuttling up and downstairs with waiters there, all the while expressing its love of good food in luscious close up.
All the characters are expertly handled by his actors, though the dialogue does get lost occasionally in the naturalistic overlapping soundtrack. But this film is handled with panache and creative skill, and is thoroughly impressive.
In a capsule: Rush hour in a popular family-owned New York restaurant becomes a little too exciting when two thugs on the take show up.
4 stars