Chalk me up as another reviewer who found this movie to be vastly overrated. My wife and I saw it a couple nights ago, for the first time, and it just pales in comparison to cinematic triumphs such as The Godfather movies or The Sopranos.
As much as anything else, there are no likable characters. Part of the reason you could keep turning in to The Sopranos is that you could genuinely like and identify with the principals, despite their brutality and crimes. Here, you can't. None of the principals have any displayed virtues: at best, they're shallow and two-dimensional.
Yes, the highly lauded soundtrack has many tunes. But if you're going to use the hoary old tactic of advancing pop tunes down the years to denote the march of time, could you not be so flamingly anachronistic as all of that? They were playing 40s tunes in the doo-wop era, 50s doo-wop post-British Invasion, 60s psychedelic pop in the 70s, and early Eric Clapton in the disco era. Get the freaking DATES right.
Speaking of anachronisms, the film's jammed with them, and while it's superficially a glittering, gritty portrait of the wiseguy life and the wiseguy era, the goofs just overload. Cars too late for the year. Phones too late for the year. Livery too late for the year. Did Scorsese bother at all with accuracy and continuity, or did they just say "Eh, get an old looking car out there." It pains me to read about how exacting and painstaking DeNiro was to get every aspect of Jimmy's personality true to life, exactly how the real Jimmy Burke did, in the middle of a blizzard of anachronisms.
Most damning, there's just no dramatic tension. There's little by way of plot, little by way of suspense. The actors did good jobs with the material and direction they were given, but that's not remotely enough to sustain this seriously overrated flick.
5/10.
As much as anything else, there are no likable characters. Part of the reason you could keep turning in to The Sopranos is that you could genuinely like and identify with the principals, despite their brutality and crimes. Here, you can't. None of the principals have any displayed virtues: at best, they're shallow and two-dimensional.
Yes, the highly lauded soundtrack has many tunes. But if you're going to use the hoary old tactic of advancing pop tunes down the years to denote the march of time, could you not be so flamingly anachronistic as all of that? They were playing 40s tunes in the doo-wop era, 50s doo-wop post-British Invasion, 60s psychedelic pop in the 70s, and early Eric Clapton in the disco era. Get the freaking DATES right.
Speaking of anachronisms, the film's jammed with them, and while it's superficially a glittering, gritty portrait of the wiseguy life and the wiseguy era, the goofs just overload. Cars too late for the year. Phones too late for the year. Livery too late for the year. Did Scorsese bother at all with accuracy and continuity, or did they just say "Eh, get an old looking car out there." It pains me to read about how exacting and painstaking DeNiro was to get every aspect of Jimmy's personality true to life, exactly how the real Jimmy Burke did, in the middle of a blizzard of anachronisms.
Most damning, there's just no dramatic tension. There's little by way of plot, little by way of suspense. The actors did good jobs with the material and direction they were given, but that's not remotely enough to sustain this seriously overrated flick.
5/10.