Movie Review: 'Sleepers'

In Barry Levinson’s luridly faithful adaptation of Lorenzo Carcaterra’s ”true” best-seller, four boys growing up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen during the mid-’60s are sent to hell for real when one of their pranks turns tragic. At the Wilkinson Home for Boys, they are raped by a cabal of stone-faced guards. There follows a bloody retribution killing followed by a trial so preposterous it makes the most outlandish courtroom melodrama look like a yawny day on Court TV. In it’s screw tightening way, the first hour holds you, but the second is a disaster. Neither Jason Patric nor Brad Pitt has ever been duller (or looked worse — they seem to be having bad-hair and bad-skin days). C