The darkly humorous title and opening credit sequence of Dead Canaries hint at danger for either Harlan County coal miners or Little Italy stool pigeons. Robert Santoli’s independent film takes more or less the latter route but rather staggeringly expands its scope to embrace several elements from today’s omnivorously sensationalist media.

Surprisingly, the tale is really not all that complicated. Vito Scaldifieri (Dan Luria) is a fortyish enforcer and hit man with old-fashioned standards of loyalty and respect. His heart-of-gold credentials—a good man in a bad business, as it were—are established early on as he saves a woman from attempted robbery-rape and gives $20 to a scruffy street person. He also rescues his partner, the Boss’ nephew Nicky (Brandon Fox), then with kindness lectures the young man about traditional values (including learning Italian).

Four years later, now adoringly married to Sharon (Dee Wallace Stone), the Irish woman he saved and took to the hospital and then home, Vito dreams of his own little restaurant, a house in the country and children. The dream appears shattered when he and Nicky are arrested red-handed in a buy-and-bust operation in which two drug dealers are shot to death, one of them a DEA undercover agent. The Mob, it seems, is hardly a shadow of its former honorable self: with money, lawyers and influence, it springs the blood-family nephew and leaves the older partner to face the murder rap.

The Feds, however, are out for bigger game. Murderers or not, small potatoes don’t particularly interest them, so the Witness Protection Agency makes an offer, a conviction of graphics "businessman" Boss-uncle Paulie DeMartino (Frank Gio) in exchange for a new life for the condemned man. Sharon runs into newspaperman Jimmy Kerrigan (Charles Durning), her deceased mother’s one-time suitor—the thwarted rapists had tried to steal that mother’s wedding ring—and together they convince her husband to take the deal, "to be a rat," as he puts it.

Only trouble is, someone has been finding and offing those who have accepted new identities and lives under the program: five such cases to date are seen or mentioned. This is only the beginning, as amateur investigation leads into a tangle of conspiracy involving the Agency, organized crime, downed airliners and paramilitary maneuvers by a swastika-headquartered, army-equipped Aryan group, all somehow nestling in rural Westchester County. Caught in the middle are the good people, the small potatoes—Vito and Sharon, of course, Jimmy and eventually repentant Nicky.

Shot on high definition 24p video, in and around New York—this movie seems a sort of extended-family affair—Dead Canaries has bitten off too much. Notwithstanding happy exceptions such as The Manchurian Candidate and The Parallax View, conspiracy theories in high places finally do not sit easily on the screen. Like most of them, this one, too, relies on violations of probability and common sense that work against acceptance.

This is not to say such films cannot be good, in the sense of entertaining, until one thinks for a minute. But here, leaving aside a final, de rigueur ominous "twist" immediately on the heels of a silly, feel-good schmaltzy turn, a cast of known character actors with film, stage and TV experience struggles with stilted dialogue which results in uneasy listening. It does not help, either, when many post-Don Corleone capos speak in caricature whispers, though Raymond Serra’s gravelly voiced Sammy does bring some commonsense humor to his brief diatribe. Still, because of the cast’s skill, the characters in Dead Canaries win our sympathy or dislike. Many of their faces are familiar and comfortable, and, with good looks, great eyes and believable presence, newcomer Brandon Fox may, with any luck, be at the start of a bright career.

Indicative of Dead Canaries is that, in context, its most subtle moment—appropriately visual rather than spoken—went unnoticed, to judge by reaction at the screening I attended. Jimmy is seated behind his unrealistically neat reporter’s desk, and on the wall, fleetingly seen, is a New York Post tabloid front page with a one-word, 150-point screamer. "WAR," it reads. If the film as subtly captured and organized the nation’s worst post-September 11 fears, that ironic and yet not ironic word should have leaped out at everyone.

(Produced by RAS Films LLC; no MPAA rating available.)