Some Directors have left such a mark on American cinema that their style seems to have become its own genre of film. So let me set the record straight:

Martin Scorcese is a director. Not a genre.

Which is the problem with, I’m sorry to say, nearly every moment of the film Brooklyn Rules that stuffs every last Italian-American, Catholic, Brooklyn, blue collar, male-bonding, mafia-tinged, good-kid-trying-to-make-his-way-out-of-the-rough-and-tumble-neighborhood cliche into a mediocre attempt at emulating Scorcese’s early masterpiece Mean Streets.

Throw in a couple of scenes stolen directly from Saturday Night Fever, down to the interrupted sex in the backseat of the bar and romantic shots of the Verrazano bridge, and you’ve got a director who clearly wishes he had made one of the afformentioned films, not just cannibalized them.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Brooklyn Rules is the story of three best friends from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A trio of Catholic School trouble-makers who find a dead body on the beach and each walk away with a momento.

Bobby takes the dog sitting in a carrying case in the back, the almost comically vain Carmine takes a zippo lighter and our protagonist Mike takes a revolver from the glove compartment. Making sure that we remember that gun for every slow, drawn out second of the film.

The boys grow up into Jerry Ferrara (from HBO’s Entourage) as Bobby, a dumb cheapskate who wants nothing more than to marry his girl, work for the Post Office (apparently, he’s too dumb for anything else) and pray at every Virgin Mary statue he passes.

Scott Caan, one of the few competent actors in this film becomes Carmine, with bulging biceps and a pathological fixation on his hair. Carmine of course, wants to get mobbed up. (And only mob-boss Ceasar Manganaro, played by the often bored-looking Alec Baldwin) is his way in.

And sadly, Michael, (who irritatingly narrates us through every second of film) is the work-a-day Columbia University classroom hustler. Pitifully, what little the screenwriter offered the character is then mangled by the talentless Freddie Prinze Jr.

The scenes are repetitive to the point where by the seventh time the boys are sitting around in classic Brooklyn locales drinking Budweiser, you must presume that the Milwauke based company was one of the film’s primary investors. When the esoteric scene that begins the film comes full circle at the end, it leaves the audience thinking. . . what. . . So that’s it?

Brooklyn Rules was directed by Michael Corrente whose unimpressive resume indicates that he’s not in line for an Oscar nod anytime soon. However, it was written by Soprano’s verteran Terrence Winter. It seems like he’s trying for his Scorcese moment, and clearly fails in his first attempt.

Rounding out the lifeless performances of the film is Mena Suvari as Ellen, Michael’s classroom love interest (from Connecticut of course, and has her birthday party at a bar in TriBeCa! Ooohhh, fancy!) She goes through her lines with absolutely zero chemistry with her goofball screen partner, in the back of her eyes, you can almost hear her saying (I went from American Beauty to this?)

The highlights of the film come from the clever barbs and one liners the boys from Bay Ridge lay on each other, the classic 1980’s nostalgia, and the English-mangling father of our boy Bobby, for whom each line is a hillarious hodge-podge of misused words.

Cliches can be fun sometimes. But stuff a movie full of them, and it leaves you wondering what, if anything, from this film was worth taking from it on its own merits.