The good news
about Gangster Squad is they made a
wonderful and convincing set of 1950s Los Angeles that rivals the modern
classic (and one of my personal favorites) L.A.
Confidential. The bad news is pretty
much everything else. Despite a talented
cast, the only actors who seemed to put any effort into this are Josh Brolin
(who was just okay) and Sean Penn (who chewed the scenery like it was a
drumstick). Of course to be fair, even
Daniel Day-Lewis couldn’t have saved a movie with a script this awful.
The “story” begins
with Sergeant O’Mara (Josh Brolin) singlehandedly shutting down a brothel owned
by Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) the most notorious gangster in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, his efforts are quickly undone
by a blatantly corrupt judge and the criminals walk. O’Mara is then warned by his partner, his
boss and even his pregnant wife that it’ll be much safer for him to stop going
up against Cohen but O’Mara will not be intimidated. That is pretty much the closest thing to
character development that O’Mara or anybody else in this movie will ever get.
Meanwhile, the
chief of police (Nick Nolte) is fighting a losing battle against Cohen and more
or less feels powerless to stop him. When
he reads about O’Mara’s exploits he becomes so impressed by his methods, he
chooses him to recruit and lead a handful of LAPD officers in a covert (a word
I use very loosely) operation to put Cohen out of business for good. To help him in his crusade O’Mara enlists
Sergeant Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) and four other officers whose names I’ve
already forgotten and frankly aren’t really worth remembering anyway.
The officers waste
no time in going after Cohen and his operations: boring action scenes ensue. They start by trying to knock over of the
mobster’s casino. Unfortunately, the so
called Gangster Squad blows the mission almost immediately and two of the
officers are almost killed by some dirty cops.
Not learning their lesson from their first botched mission, they attack
a large heroin shipment where they are immediately outgunned. Even though they succeed in destroying the
shipment they are once again lucky to get out alive. What’s worse is the cops go after Cohen’s
businesses with the subtlety of an 18-wheeler so, naturally it doesn’t take him
very long to figure out that he’s been targeted by cops, thus defeating the
entire purpose of a secret operation. By
that point, all hell breaks loose.
I feel obligated
to mention that there is also a subplot where Sergeant Wooters starts up a
relationship with Cohen’s girlfriend (whose name I’ve also forgotten) played by
Emma Stone. I feel compelled to comment on
this mostly because a significant amount of screen time is revolved around this
plotline. Really both of these
characters development is so one-dimensional you could cut out about 95% of
this supposed love story and the plot wouldn’t really change that much.
Apart from the set
design, this film falls short on pretty much every level. While there technically isn’t a single factor
alone that makes this movie bad for me, as a whole the production just feels
lifeless, bland, and completely devoid of enthusiasm. I’m not going to be surprised if this ends up
on my Worst of 2013 list at the end of the year. If Gangster
Squad is the kind of movie you want to watch, I beg of you to save your
time and money and use it to watch L.A.
Confidential or Brick
instead. You’ll thank me later.
Grade: C-
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