It's New York in the 20s. The men exemplify sartorial splendor and the women are buffed. The photography has a burnished glow to it. The men are all Italians or Jews and they sit around a big table and proffer business deals. They gesture a good deal, running off at the hands. They greet one another operatically, with big smiles and hugs, and statements like, "'Ey, you lookin' good. It's been too long." They're all loving friends except that behind each others' backs they scheme like nobody's business (or "bidness") to kill one another. Then they break out the .45 caliber choppers and God help the Capo sitting at his table slurping down rigatoni and that glass of robust red vino. He's going to wind up with heartburn.
I kind of enjoy movies like this, about big-name mobsters with names like Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano and Mad Dog Coll and Meyer Lansky. I thrill at the way the writers slightly bend the story so that we sympathize with, in this instance, Christian Slater as Luciano. He's the central figure -- and he's basically a VIRTUOUS MAN. He never kills anybody unless there's a very good reason for it. And the better the reason, the more bloody and barbarous the slaughter is. He catches Mad Dog Coll unawares and empties his Tommy Gun into the squirming body. The explosion of so many squib charges has never before been committed to celluloid. You remember how Sonny Corleone, James Caan, gets shot up at the turnpike entrance in "The Godfather"? That was nothing compared to what happens to Mad Dog Coll.
My understanding is that our real, contemporaneous mobsters sit around enjoying these movies and chuckling over them, wondering, only half dreamily, who's going to play THEM in the next Mafia movie.
The fact is, though, that this isn't very original. Roger Corman did it just as well twenty or thirty years earlier, on a lesser budget, and with tongue in cheek. This film tries desperately to be a serious look at what long ago became a joke. The sources that have been ripped off are not only gangster movies, beginning with "Little Caesar" and meandering through The Godfathers and Goodfellas, picking a bit here and a shtick there, but hard-core pornography. There are just enough plot points established -- who's bedding whom, who has a grudge against whom, and how about that tentative meeting between rivals -- to justify the more interesting scenes, the ones everyone is waiting for, sex in pornography, stupendous violence in "Mobsters." You haven't lived until you see a scarlet pool of gore spilling viscously across the tiled floor of a steam bath.
Frankly, I'm getting a little jaded. I don't care if these moral morons protected their wives, loved their girl friends, went to the opera, enjoyed rugala, disliked fluorescent light bulbs, wanted to save the pandas, or had a magnificent stamp collection. It's the one percent of the time when they are putting a bullet through someone's forehead that bothers me. Showing us their human side amounts to a sort of apologia. You know -- I'm fundamentally decent. I just have this piacular quirk.
They don't deserve this favorable propaganda. They deserve long jail terms, but then a lot of people belong in jail who are now sailing on Long Island Sound.
I kind of enjoy movies like this, about big-name mobsters with names like Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano and Mad Dog Coll and Meyer Lansky. I thrill at the way the writers slightly bend the story so that we sympathize with, in this instance, Christian Slater as Luciano. He's the central figure -- and he's basically a VIRTUOUS MAN. He never kills anybody unless there's a very good reason for it. And the better the reason, the more bloody and barbarous the slaughter is. He catches Mad Dog Coll unawares and empties his Tommy Gun into the squirming body. The explosion of so many squib charges has never before been committed to celluloid. You remember how Sonny Corleone, James Caan, gets shot up at the turnpike entrance in "The Godfather"? That was nothing compared to what happens to Mad Dog Coll.
My understanding is that our real, contemporaneous mobsters sit around enjoying these movies and chuckling over them, wondering, only half dreamily, who's going to play THEM in the next Mafia movie.
The fact is, though, that this isn't very original. Roger Corman did it just as well twenty or thirty years earlier, on a lesser budget, and with tongue in cheek. This film tries desperately to be a serious look at what long ago became a joke. The sources that have been ripped off are not only gangster movies, beginning with "Little Caesar" and meandering through The Godfathers and Goodfellas, picking a bit here and a shtick there, but hard-core pornography. There are just enough plot points established -- who's bedding whom, who has a grudge against whom, and how about that tentative meeting between rivals -- to justify the more interesting scenes, the ones everyone is waiting for, sex in pornography, stupendous violence in "Mobsters." You haven't lived until you see a scarlet pool of gore spilling viscously across the tiled floor of a steam bath.
Frankly, I'm getting a little jaded. I don't care if these moral morons protected their wives, loved their girl friends, went to the opera, enjoyed rugala, disliked fluorescent light bulbs, wanted to save the pandas, or had a magnificent stamp collection. It's the one percent of the time when they are putting a bullet through someone's forehead that bothers me. Showing us their human side amounts to a sort of apologia. You know -- I'm fundamentally decent. I just have this piacular quirk.
They don't deserve this favorable propaganda. They deserve long jail terms, but then a lot of people belong in jail who are now sailing on Long Island Sound.