Dir.
Ruben Fleicher / Cert 15 / 111 minutes)
How
can a film with so many guns, so much blood and such a fine cast fall so flat?
I’m a big fan of the genre, so I had high expectations for Gangster Squad, but everything here has been done before and done
better. It feels to me as if the filmmakers worked to a shopping list of
ingredients, a tick-list of ‘must-include’ tropes thrown together, checked off
one-by-one by cautious, smug Hollywood execs, dollar signs for eyes, staring
greedily out of empty bloodless sockets.
The
result is a workmanlike, shallow and impassionate jigsaw of mismatched pieces,
all style and no substance, all pizazz and no plot, with dialogue that sounds
like it’s come straight out of ‘How to Write A Gangster Movie for Dummies’. I
couldn’t even enjoy it as a piece of pastiche because the characters were so
utterly dimensionless Performances are weak across the board – Ryan Gosling and
Emma Stone can’t decide whether to go for ham or cheese, and have none of the
chemistry (sexual or otherwise) that they brought to Crazy Stupid Love and somebody really needed to take Nick Nolte and
Sean Penn aside and tell them that this wasn’t a pantomime. Perhaps I should
lighten-up – from what I understand, many people have enjoyed Penn’s
over-the-top villain, but I’m sorry, having him snarling lines like ‘Out here,
I’m a GOD!!!’ took me completely out of the story and the drama. Admittedly,
the shoot ‘em up climax is well-shot and slickly executed, and the closest the
film ever comes to having a pulse, but by this point, the damage is done and I
couldn’t care less who lives and who dies, who wins and who loses.
If
you want super-slick 1940s noir-thriller, look no further than the superb LA
Confidential (1997), or do yourself a favour and invest in HBO’s continuing
masterwork Boardwalk Empire, a
contemporary example of how to do period-set gangster drama intelligently and
unpredictably. If you want to waste your time and your money, see this.
No comments:
Post a Comment