Gangster Squad

 

At its best, Gangster Squad is an intentionally shallow, over the top piece of popcorn entertainment with a lot of recognizable actors dressed in stylized 1940s outfits.  It kind of comes close to working as a guilty pleasure, with its tone constantly switching back and forth from overly violent crime thriller, to a somewhat intentionally silly and campy live action detective comic book.  At its worst, Gangster Squad plays like an uninspired remake of Brian de Palma's The Untouchables, without the script by David Mamet.  Instead, first-time screenwriter, Will Beall, gives us a non-stop barrage of bargain-basement cliched Crime Noir dialogue.

It all balances out to a movie that works in parts, and misfires in others.  Director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) sure does know how to mount a handsome looking gangster epic.  The movie looks like a million, with a wonderful attention to detail in its settings and costumes.  The actors also all look the part.  Josh Brolin, playing the square-jawed officer of the law, looks like a hero from a Dick Tracy comic strip come to life.  Sean Penn, as real-life crime boss Mickey Cohen, hams it up with evil glee.  And Emma Stone, as the crime boss' main gal who's really not as bad as she seems, looks wonderful with her ruby red lips and figure-hugging 40s gowns.  This is all tremendous fun at first, but the realization slowly dawns on us that this is a movie that's all dressed up with no place to go.  The actors look the part, but are given no favors by the screenplay, which gives them nothing to do. 

Gangster Squad is "inspired by the true story" of how six lawmen teamed up to shut down Cohen's crime empire, as he attempted to gain control of Los Angeles in 1949.  He has most of the police and judicial system in his pocket, and is building a sex and drug empire that rivals anything going on in Chicago.  The leader of the men who aim to defeat Cohen is Sgt. John O'Mara (Brolin), who has a strong sense of justice, and a pregnant wife at home whose sole purpose in the film is to wring her hands a lot and look nervous whenever her husband talks about how he wants to take the crime kingpin down.  The grizzled Chief of Police (Nick Nolte) personally chooses O'Mara to lead the team, and allows him to choose the other members himself.  The men he chooses include a war veteran and ladies man named Jerry (Ryan Gosling), an aged sharpshooter named Max Kennard (Robert Patrick) and his faithful sidekick, Navidad Ramirez (Michael Pena), a mechanical genius and family man named Conway (Giovanni Ribisi), who severs as the brains of the group, and a black police officer named Coleman (Anthony Mackie), whom the movie forgets to give any defining traits to, other than he's good at throwing knives once in a while.

Once the group is formed, we never really get a sense of who these men are, their relationships with one another, or their involvement in the mission.  Yeah, they all want to see justice done in one way or another, and they all want to see Mickey Cohen taken down.  But then what?  Most of their efforts to destroy Cohen's empire are tossed aside in montages, or flamboyant action set pieces and car chases.  We don't get any scenes where the men sit down and plan out their actions.  When they do seem to supposed to be making a plan, their attention usually seems somewhere else, like how ladies man Jerry is in love with a woman (Emma Stone) who's currently hooked up with Cohen.  These characters are paper thin, and never build a sense of partnership in or outside of battle.  Even when things are supposed to be going bad, and Mickey finds out that the Gangster Squad has been bugging his mansion home to get inside information on his criminal activities, the consequences don't seem to hit as hard as they should.  The movie seems to want us to think that things are now getting personal, but since the movie keeps these characters at a distance to us, there's no emotional impact.

The movie largely decides to play loose with history, and gives us things like dramatic shootouts in lush hotel lobbies, car chases in the Hollywood hills, and a particularly over the job jailbreak sequence that comes close to self parody at times.  It's all genuinely well done, and does have a certain energy to it that livens things up.  It just can't hide the fact that this is a weak script that treats its characters with total indifference.  For all of its lavish style and old fashioned gangster movie charm, I never got behind these people.  The actors are clearly having fun with their roles, but they never come close to making them anything more than character types (the law-abiding tough guy, the fun-loving one, the smart one, etc).  This is what ultimately brings the film down to being a semi-successful guilty pleasure.  Yeah, it's fun at times and it never offends, but it should have been so much more than what it is.

 

Gangster Squad was bumped from its original fall release date to January when it was forced to undergo some reshoots.  This is probably for the best, as the much stronger fall movie competition would have eaten it alive.  As an early year release, it's heavily flawed, but certainly not terrible.  If the script had gotten as much care as the settings, costumes, and actors, this could have been a rare early year winner.  Instead, like most movies hitting this month, it's bound to be forgotten by the time Spring comes around.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

0 comments