If popular culture is any indication, life in the mob isn't nearly as glamorous as it once was. In Ghost Dog, geriatric mobsters look and act like they wandered out of a rundown nursery home, while The Sopranos centers on a depressed mob kingpin burdened with neuroses. Even more humiliatingly, Thick As Thieves has mob-affiliated professional thief Alec Baldwin double-crossed while stealing a bundle of food stamps, barely escaping death by killing two crooked cops. Assisted by a pair of sidekicks, Baldwin sets out to exact revenge on the slick gangster (Michael Jai White) who set him up, a quest that quickly grows to involve black gangsters, the white mob, and police detective Rebecca De Mornay. Baldwin has always been a character actor alternately blessed and cursed with a matinee idol's face; he's always at his best playing slick villains and charismatic anti-heroes. Though his role here superficially recalls his career-best turn as a demented hood in the underrated Miami Blues, he's given almost nothing to work with, his deadpan character defined almost entirely by a love of dogs and old jazz records. Trapped in a thankless role, Baldwin is easily upstaged by his flashy supporting cast, most notably White, who scores nearly all the film's laughs as an upwardly mobile gangster who's improbably obsessed with manners and keeping up appearances, and André Braugher as his lieutenant. Overcrowded, leadenly paced, and bogged down with unnecessary subplots, Thick As Thieves suffers from a fatal lack of momentum, meandering aimlessly while building up little tension or suspense. Baldwin often seems more like a minor supporting character than the protagonist, making his quest for revenge feel like a casual afterthought, a fatal flaw for a film that takes forever to get going before limping to a dull anticlimax.