Push Comes to Shove

Oasis (Duplicity) delivers a cookie-cutter urban drama that, while long on crime, violence, betrayals, and melodrama, is unfortunately short on coherence and logic. Greg "GP" Patterson is a family man and aspiring comic book artist who struggles to get by and isn't opposed to the occasional light crime to help make ends meet, but with his comic book dreams going nowhere and his luck getting harder—including a repo man who repossesses just about everything he owns and a trumped-up assault case that has his family separated—he hooks up with a friend to hustle money quickly to get his family back, only to unwittingly put them further in danger. Genre staples abound, but the characters are far from consistent or believable, while implausibilities (what are the odds of stumbling upon the mayor smoking crack with hookers?) and an unruly structure that ping-pongs between points of view and various overheated plot lines overpower the potentially entertaining cautionary tale at the center. (Mar.)