Gangster Squad
(2013)
Substitute Al Capone for Mickey Cohen, and
you have a gangster movie closely following The
Untouchables’ formula but devoid of that film’s style and wit; an elite
squad of police misfits are assembled to bring down a mob boss, and they aren’t
afraid to get their hands dirty.
Director Ruben Fleischer (whose Zombieland was a lot of fun, but it’s
difficult to see how anyone thought he’d bring out the best in this material)
and writer Will Beall are no Brian De Palma and David Mamet, but I think they’d
quite like to be. The Untouchables
played on the clichés of the crime fiction and Mamet delivered an intentionally
straightforward morality play; the flourish of De Palma’s direction and Ennio
Morricone’s score transformed it into something indelible. The writer/director team
of Gangster Squad simply delivers the
B movie material in B movie fashion.
The production design and period trappings
furnish the production with the kind of finesse you’d expect, but Fleischer’s
approach is resolutely cartoonish. This is one step up from Dick Tracy, rather than one step down
from serious mob fare. As if to emphasise its true heritage, Sean Penn’s Cohen is
buried under ridiculous prosthetics; he looks nothing less than a supporting
villain in Warren Beatty’s take on the comic book detective. Sure, the director
can handle an action sequence. But he has no take on the material other than to
render it as blandly pulpy as possible. When Cohen informs a henchman “You know the drill”, and seconds later the
boss and a couple of goons make mince of his brains with an electric drill,
it’s clear that this film has few aspirations to intelligence or refinement.
Needless to say, the script plays fast and
loose with the history of the case. Early on, it looks like it might have the
balls to eke out a distinctive path as squad leader John O’Mara (Josh Brolin)
takes an unwise brawn-before-brains approach and nearly gets the team killed.
But, with only a couple of sequences illustrating their approach and almost no
insight into Cohen and his activities (other than that he is nasty, has designs
on expanding his empire, and has a squeeze – Emma Stone – who is also seeing
squad member Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling)), it’s set to end up shallow and
dissatisfying. Lip service is paid to outsmarting Cohen, but the film is really
only interested in over-the-top shootouts and car chases with tommy guns
blazing. Such an approach could only take off if told with vibrancy, but what
we get is so-so pastiche.
As such the cast is a waste; Brolin and
Gosling give shading to the honourable cop and the jaded cop respectively.
Brolin, at least, is something of a hardnosed variation on Costner’s clean-cut
Elliot Ness. Mireille Enos also provides a different take on the devoted wife;
pregnant and reluctant to see her husband killed, she gives his list of squad
candidates the once-over to ensure he has adequate protection. Stone has great
chemistry with Gosling, but her role is entirely derivative. Penn is unimpressive;
most likely the script is partly to blame, but he’s your standard rent-a-thug. In
The Untouchables, De Niro has
considerably less screen time as Al Capone but the impact and economy of
Mamet’s writing ensures that his presence is felt throughout. Other members of
the squad are given little chance to make an impression, with Beall hoping the
audience will pick up on their “types” in the place of characterisations
(Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribsi – not mugging frantically for a change -,
Michael Pena and Robert Patrick). It’s a predictable measure of Beall’s
indebtedness to The Untouchables that
the brains and old-timer in the squad don’t make it to the end credits; there
is none of the pathos of the 1987 film, however.
The film required reshoots when a sequence
in a movie theatre was cut following the Aurora shootings. It was replaced with
the film’s Chinatown sequence; the makers would have better spent their time
attending to the telegraphed plotting and lack of intrigue, rather than adding
more explosions and bullet-riddled bodies. It is a violent film, but one with little impact; you don’t care much
for the protagonists or their agenda and, by the time of the wearisomely
inevitable fistfight announces the climax, Fleischer has completely lost any
grip on the material.
**1/2
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