Film 5: Gangster Squad - 12/1/13

3/10

Last summer when I saw the first trailer for Gangster Squad, everything about it, the cast, the cinematography, the Jay-Z soundtrack I was amazed and excited for. I told everyone I could that this film would be amazing and be heralded one of the greatest gangster films of our time. Well now I feel like a fucking idiot. It is really depressing because this film had potential, it had everything in place to be a classic gangster movie on the same level as The Untouchables, Goodfellas and Heat. They had the villain in Sean Penn who was one aspect of the film that held up in the film, his portrayal of Mickey Cohen was terrifying. They had a great cast of supporting police officers, the leader in Josh Brolin an oscar nominated actor who is a perfect cast as the hero of the film however his character is so generic, bland and predictable that he is instantly forgettable. Ryan Gosling is always enjoyable to watch in a film but again his character was two dimensional and the attempt to give him a motivation in the movie with his shoe-shiner dying was so cliched it was painful to watch. The other supporting characters also filled out the tropes of gangster films. The gruff old-timer in Robert Patrick, the stooge with Michael Pena, the knive man with Anthony Mackie and the tech-head with Giovanni Ribisi who's story arc is identical to that of Charles Martin Smith in The Untouchables. Emma Stone was supposed to rekindle the romantic chemistry with Ryan Gosling from Crazy, Stupid, Love. But instead it was again too predictable, cliched and unexplored to make us care about it, the few scenes with them together were cheesy and awkward. This was down to a frankly awful script full of cliches and nonsensical one liners. In one scene Nick Noltes character says:

"Two things you can't take back. Words out of your mouth and bullets out of your gun"

I can't emphasise how much I cringed at that point and at many of the lines in the film. Maybe I am being too harsh on this film just because my expectations were so high but it was a major letdown, the script was incredibly predictable and the editing and timing was all off. It just felt like they moved from one set-piece to the next monotonously with a constant, even timing for each set piece there was no build-up of tension through timing. I think O'Mara should have taken longer to assemble his team which would have made everything seem more important and would have built the tension more, but instead it was just predictably progressive. However you do have do give credit to the mise en scene which was fantastic, the sets were brilliant, the costumes were believable and glamorous and the lighting was dramatic and cinematic, particularly the opening shots of Cohen's silhouette boxing. It is tragic to see a director with the potential that Ruben Fleischer had after Zombieland, and a film with the potential of Gangster Squad fail. If only the script and the editing was better, the film would have been a classic, not just a rehash of The Untouchables.