No.235 : The Irishman (2019)

 

The Irishman at the IMDb

I’d put off watching ‘The Irishman’ due to its infamous length of over three hours, but having watched it in two sessions it just flew by and it’s certainly one you should look up. That said it could have done with some serious editing with a lot of stuff padded out, or not really necessary to tell the story.

The Irishman of the title is Frank Sheeran, a hit man and union leader played by Robert De Niro. We meet him at first in an old folks home where he’s recounting his story to an unseen person. His story dissolves to a flashback where he, Joe Pesci and their wives are heading to a wedding. Their car breaks down and De Niro and Pesci reminisce about how they first met. So the flashback becomes a further flashback to the days when De Niro was a truck driver and Pesci a gang boss.

De Niro soon rises through the ranks of the local mob by ‘painting houses’ a euphemism for whacking people, normally with a couple of shots in the back of the head meaning their walls get a nice bit of decoration. Pesci's mob boss works closely with the Teamsters trucking union which is run by Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and De Niro is loaned to him to help out with some business. He later becomes a union organiser himself and as the years pass we witness their involvement in the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy assassination amongst other dubious events.

Meanwhile De Niro is estranged from his four daughters, mainly because he’s such a big psycho that beats up the local grocer and for all the murders. The pivotal event of the film is the famous disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa and it is covered in some detail. Seemingly the facts are disputed but the film certainly hitches its wagon to real life confession of Frank.

We meet loads of other gangsters and the film helpfully adds captions giving their names and how they met their demise - not many died of natural causes! Eventually we are back in the care home with De Niro nearing the end of his days with all his contemporaries having gone before him. Can he find redemption from the church and can he reconcile with his family?

This was a great film that was very much in the same style as ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘Casino’. I don’t think it was as good as those films, but they do set a high mark. Essentially you get a trip through 40 years of gangland violence and racketeering set against the soundtrack of the time. It is well documented that the three leads were de-aged by computer and the effect was generally good. I didn’t buy that the 70 year old plus actors were in their 40s but they certainly didn’t look their years.

The sets and costumes were great and the evocation of the eras depicted was well done. The film was too long however, and I think it could have been boiled down to two hours or at least turned into a 4 part mini series. The depiction of Hoffa’s last hours went on for an age and I don’t see what all the talk of a fish did to help the flow of the scenes. You could say it built tension, but I was losing interest as they rambled on about whether it was a cod or halibut.

There were some great supporting performances too with people like Stephen Graham, Jessie Plemons, Bobbie Cannavale and an under used Harvey Keitel all getting a look in.

Overall the film is worth the investment of your time. I think director Martin Scorsese was probably given too much of a free hand as the film was allowed to ramble and go off into irrelevant tangents, so maybe a non-director’s cut is the one to look out for!

Best Bit : Grocer gets checked out    75%

No.151 : The Outsider (2018)

The Outsider at the IMDb

The regular reader of this blog will remember that we have twice before visited the genre of ‘round eye in Japan’ in The Challenge and The Yakuza. Both these films were decent with the usual cultural differences played out to give a bit of drama as well as stuff being chopped off.

This entry in to the increasingly busy genre stars Jared Leto as the only non-Japanese in an Osaka prison. We don’t know his back-story but he has a bushy beard so it may be something to do with razor blades. He has a lowly job in the prison and has to defer to the Yakuza gangster inmates who are identifiable by their extensive tattoos.

Leto’s character ‘Nick’ saves one man from a hanging and later assists in an escape attempt when he helpfully calls the guards when his cell mate slices open his belly. The local Yakuza clan thank Nick for his efforts and get him out of jail. They also give him a job, but not one with many prospects as it involves braining an unhelpful American factory owner with a typewriter.

His new bosses are impressed and soon Leto has a suit and a tattoo of his own. His clan aren’t the strongest however, with some rivals trying to muscle in on their territory. Nick stops one incursion but has to give up two fingers when his ageing boss send over the digits as an apology rather than risk a war. That’ll be the end of his fledgling ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ career.

Nick’s family’s troubles suggest there is a rat in the camp and when it’s revealed to be his boss there is no surprise whatsoever. This nasty piece of work also makes moves on Nick’s girlfriend who is pregnant and is also involved in a big pow-wow at the docks which was a bad plan from the off. Elsewhere Nick’s back story is touched upon when he bumps into an old army colleague who suggests Nick’s appearance is a surprise and may be of interest to the military. I wouldn’t be taking any invites home if I was that guy!

With a big showdown looming who can we trust and will Nick manage to win the respect of a frankly odious bunch of gangsters?

This film started out well but lost it’s way, with the ending being a right load of old cobblers. The main failing was the character of Nick himself. It’s thinly written with no backstory at all. This starts off OK with Nick being all intense and mysterious but later on, with nothing revealed, you can be forgiven for wondering ‘Why should I care?’. We don’t know why Nick is in jail , looking like the ghost of David Bellamy, and we don’t know why he’s attracted to the Yakuza - maybe it’s the suits and the staring.

Although a Netflix film, the production is lavish with post war Japan brilliantly realised. There are plenty of gory slayings and some brutal finger choppings, none of which I could watch. Even the ‘thunk’ as the blade slices through - urrgh!

It’s not clear what the girl sees in Nick who is clearly certifiable. The Yakuza all seem quite welcoming too apart from the usual ‘white dog’ insults. Maybe they just see him as someone not scared of doing the dirty work.

I don’t think I learned anything here and the entertainment value was negligible. None of the characters engaged with me and for all his starey silences Nick just came across as a rudderless psycho with the charisma of a stale won-ton. The Japanese henchmen were mostly subtitled apart from when they tried a bit of English, but you wished those bits had been subtitled too.

You get all the usual gubblins about honour, but of course they are all stabbing each other in the back, or slicing the throat to be more exact, every chance they get.

The film is nice to look at but a strong win for style over substance.

The Tag Line : I’ll just slice that for you…

55%

No.81 : The Liability (2012)

The Liability at the IMDb

I was hoping this was going to be an exciting film set in the sexy world of insurance but alas it’s another ‘bad slags’ British gangster flick.

Wide boy 19 year old Adam should take better care of his stepdad’s stuff as a smash up in Pop’s Merc sets in motion a chain of events that will change his life forever, and take up 90 minutes of yours. His stepdad is Peter Mullen a gangster half way up the food chain. He has a nice house, is boffing Adam’s mum and has a seedy sideline in sex trafficking.

He tells Adam he’ll need to work to pay off the car debt and he sets him up with a driving job the next day. Adam isn’t keen at first but when he sees his stepdad in action on his laptop he decides he better play ball, lest he too end up in grainy x-rated footage. I just hope he shut the computer down correctly!

The next day Adam meets up with the guarded Tim Roth in a nicked Ford Granada. Tim plays Roy who prefers no chit-chat but does enjoy cassette tape Mexican music which seems a pointless affectation to add a touch of colour to his rather dull character. We learn his daughter is soon to be married and that he likes strong cheese in his sandwiches - you can’t say they are skimping on the details.

The two head to a forest and complete a messy hit on a Lithuanian gent living in a caravan. They start chopping up the body for souvenirs but are stumbled across by a young woman who manages to escape in the hapless hitmens’ car. We soon learn she’s not the innocent backpacker she makes out when she negotiates the return of the body parts for a few grand. The payoff goes OK but things start to spiral off in all directions when Tim’s true target is revealed and our savvy lady starts to turn the screws.

This was an OK sort of thriller but it wasn’t  memorable and the attempts to make it out of the ordinary seemed staged and unconvincing. For example our protagonists are all running around the country in vintage vehicles while shooting with gay abandon with never a copper in sight. I could see them trying to do a bit of the unsettling other worldliness of ‘Kill List’ but it didn’t get close to the atmosphere of that much better film.

The problem for me was in the second act where things started to get confused and muddled. It did salvage something towards the end but by then all the characters had been rewritten and any investment we had in them was long gone.

Peter Mullen was his usual angry and sweary self and Tim Roth showed his range doesn’t extend too far once again. The tension never got above lukewarm and despite some implied violence with axes there wasn’t much to react to apart from the destruction of a Churchill nodding dog, oh yes.

Overall the film wasn’t a disaster but there was nothing really to recommend it either, so damned with faint praise it is!

THE Tag Line - Yer going down - to the bargain bin!  61%

No.80 : The Brotherhood (1968)

The Brotherhood at the IMDb

Off to 1968 as Kirk Douglas tries to shoe horn is as many Mafia clichés as he can in 90 minutes - will he break the record? Fagagettaboutit!

We open as a plane begins its decent into Sicily with our focus on a nervous young man. He is rebuffed by taxi drivers at arrival when they hear his destination but one cabbie agrees to take him. He must have flown Ryanair as it takes ages for him to arrive at his destination. Meanwhile a moustachioed Kirk Douglas is also making a journey and taking his gun along for the ride.

The two meet at a ruined castle and quickly embrace - Kirk tells the guns wielding torpedoes to settle down as this is his brother. The two men have a good old chat but Kirk’s wife warns him that ‘they will send someone’ as his brother unpacks his own gun in his bedroom.

We then go into flashback mode to see how things ended up as they have.

This section of the film opens with the younger brother, Vince, getting married. He’s fresh out of the forces and asks Kirk if he can join the family firm. Kirk is made up about this but we can see that the never smooth running world of the Mafia is creaking at the edges as different factions at various tables spend the whole time glaring at each other.

Some sections of the mob are keen to modernise with a lucrative deal in electronics appealing to the new guard. Kirk is more old school and is cautious to stay in scams that he understands, which unsettles the other Dons.

Meanwhile a canary is executed and as always in these films everyone is wondering who is squealing to the Feds to save their own skin.

After some pretty complicated double crosses Kirk decides to make a stand and kills a suspected snitch. This sends him into exile to Sicily and we are quickly back where we started. With the two bothers reunited can they resolve their differences and satisfy the mob? Will ties to the Mafia supersede family loyalties?

For a film concerned with the mafia this was a dull affair with too much talking and not enough action. As the title implies ‘brotherhood’ and loyalty are closely examined but as with all mafia films they all come across as a bunch of nutters looking out for themselves. The plan here to corner the electronics market was hardly exciting, and this was borne out by Vince showing Kirk lots of accounts to demonstrate how lucrative it could be. Call me old fashioned, but I was longing for a bit of honest to goodness leg breaking instead.

The film was hung on the central relationship between the two brothers and it didn’t work for me. Kirk was the fiery, headstrong one while Vince was more thoughtful and measured. This may be to show they are chalk and cheese but I didn’t see any real passion and that followed through to the denouement where the big decision was made without a second thought.

The locations in New York and Sicily were great but the cast was chock full of dull old stereotypes and the script was plodding at best. Overall how they managed to wring such a dull non-event out of the subject matter was an achievement indeed!

THE Tag Line : You won’t see this, Right?   56%