A group of policeman operating outside the law to take down a famous gangster? Wasn't that The Untouchables? Ruben Fleischer's film has to constantly live with that comparison and, while slick and well made, is found wanting at every turn. Although packed with a great cast the film is a dud, all visuals but no invention and no soul. Los Angeles in 1949 is a city controlled by fierce gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn with some latex on his mug) through a mix of bribery and intimidation. With most of the city in his pocket, only Chief Parker (Nick Nolte, looking about 100) has the guts to take him on, recruiting war veteran Sergeant John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) to set up a black ops squad to wage war on Cohen. Before long O'Mara has recruited a team of complete stereotypes, from the Mexican one (Michael Pena), the Black one (Anthony Mackie), the Old Timer (Robert Patrick), the Sensitive Family Guy one (Giovanni Ribisi) and the Suave one (Ryan Gosling) who also happens to be shagging Cohen's girl Grace (Emma Stone). Can O'Mara and his team succeed where everyone has failed? Can they save L.A. from Cohen?
While the recreation of postwar Los Angeles is effectively done, full of sharp suits, glitzy clubs, flash motors and good time music, the whole thing looks and feels like a theme park and is about as convincing as a Frankie and Benny's diner. It doesn't help that most of the film is overlit and that everything looks too clean and new. The real problem however, is the writing. When will studios realise that it is all about the script? Now a film doesn't have to be original and there's nothing wrong with giving the audience what they want but Gangster Squad is just one old cliche after another. If anything, the script resembles a computer game, with the least amount of effort expended on character and motivation before we go into the next action set piece.
There is little nuance or subtlety which means a great cast is largely squandered on thin material that reduces them to one-dimensional cyphers; Brolin, a favourite of mine, seems stuck as Tommy Lee Jones from Men in Black 3, all scowls and growls, while Gosling, undeniably handsome, just has to look good in a suit. The romance with Emma Stone is practically non-existant and the other Squad members get no moments of charm, with Ribisi practically having 'sacrificial lamb' written on his forehead. There are more silly voices on display than your average movie too with Gosling sounding as if he's on helium to Nick Nolte who sounds as if he's constipated on the loo. Penn has fun and gets to spout some truly profane language (at one stage he memorably refers to his brothel as his 'crop of c**t') but he's as big a charicature as Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman were in Dick Tracy. Every cop movie cliche is dragged up, including a speech by one of the squad that they could no longer tell the difference between them and the crooks and even one throwing his badge away. The two female leads, Stone as Grace and Mireille Enos as pregnant Connie O'Mara, get little to do, Enos getting the thankless task of flipflopping from supporting her husband's suicide mission to railing against it. It is a truly, truly poor script.
With the writing not offering us enough to get involved in the story or with the characters what we're left with is a series of decently mounted but ultimately uninvolving action sequences. Fleischer mounts these effectively enough but the car chase has too much CGI and the finale, in a hotel lobby, is hysterical, with the most amount of convenient bullet proof pillars and plant pots ever assembled for Gosling and Brolin to shelter behind. Even Fleischer seems bored, choosing now to focus on slow motion shots of Christmas baubles exploding rather than on our protaganists. The whole thing ends with a lame punch up between Penn and Brolin in a fountain which recalls Lethal Weapon and a dozen other better movies. As a low budget affair we could forgive this but with a cast like this and an obvious amount of cash thrown at it, Gangster Squad is criminally hackneyed. Send it down.
GK Rating: ** The Blog of Delights
No comments:
Post a Comment