In Zombieland, a genre satire about the walking dead, director Ruben Fleischer showed a lot of wit and invention. Stuck with a premise that was, at best, routine, Fleischer twisted that movies wobbly head into something that was fast, funny and irreverent.
[Sean Penn's performance] is so oversized it tips the movie over.
In Gangster Squad Fleischer is back deep in genre territory. But this time his attitude to the material is earnest and the treatment trendy.
The City of Angels has been home to a lot of great crime stories: Chinatown (1974), Heat (1995), and L.A. Confidential (1997) to name a handful from the modern era. In those pictures you felt the complex sprawl of that city: its uneasy ethnic and social mix, its glamour and cruelty. Those movies hummed with a compelling myth that felt powerful and true: LA’s promise of the quick fix and good times was the perfect mask to hide vice and viciousness. Fleischer’s LA in Gangster Squad doesn’t leave you with any lingering feelings and thoughts of disquiet. Its pretty, sculptured emptiness is merely a theme-park setting for a battle between Good and Evil.
Still, Gangster Squad is, in raw form, the ultimate Los Angeles crime story. Set in 1949 the plot fabricates an elaborate fiction out of the biography of Mickey Cohen, a real life hood. Portly, and avuncular Cohen, a gambler, and vice-king who dabbled in haberdashery, and loved the press, hung out with movie stars and was a crony of Bugsy Siegel. The press loved him back. The legend is that Cohen controlled most of LA’s crime. The LAPD settled upon a solution; a special squad of detectives was set up to harass Cohen. He dubbed them 'the Idiot Squad’. That kind of ironic humour didn’t make it into the movie.
The screenplay by Will Beal, based on the book by Paul Lieberman, had a reputation amongst LA’s movie power brokers as a hot property. It has lots of 'sell’ points that studios are craven for; full of one liners and extreme violence, the plot is organised around a series of action set-pieces punctuated by short, no-nonsense exposition scenes. The story riffs on World War II crack-team-on-a-secret-mission movies as well as De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987). Its cast is large but each limited role is well defined and has – in the standard trope of action pics – a moment that tells us something 'special’ about them and explains how the gangster squad’s 'suicidal’ mission will in some way redeem their past/angst/backstory.
In practice Beal’s script plays like a fan-boy's gangster movie parlour game; about 20 minutes in I was reduced to anticipating each new scene like I was ticking off a list"¦ 'Okay, here comes the scene where the hero’s family is threatened'; 'Here’s the scene where the Old Dog tries to teach the rookie, and the courageous wife supports her heroic cop hubby in his deadly duty'"¦
Fleischer and co. are working with a great cast. Josh Brolin plays a WWII vet, O’Mara, the picture's nominal hero; he’s assigned by his boss Nick Nolte (who once upon a time might have played Brolin’s part) to assemble the gangster squad. A really fine actor, what’s most striking about Brolin here is his jawline; hard, jutting and large, he reminded me of the cartoon version of Dick Tracy.
Robert Patrick plays a quick-draw gunslinger/cop, an unlikely recruit to the team; he looks a bit like Yosemite Sam.
Happily, Ryan Gosling looks like Ryan Gosling. He plays a suave but tough cop who trades his 'soft’ approach in the pursuit of corruption and vice, for a tommy gun, when one of his innocent pals falls victims to Cohen’s blood lust.
The featured women – Emma Stone and Mireille Enos - in this unapologetically male-centred picture come off a bit better; which is to say they don’t look silly and give a dignity to roles that are shamelessly shallow.
Stone is the femme fatale with the heart of gold; Cohen’s consort and Ryan Gosling’s girlfriend, Grace. Enos gets a part that looks like crap but ends up interesting; she’s Connie, O’Mara’s very pregnant wife. In what seems a rejoinder to Elliott Ness’ pure- as-the-driven-snow wife in De Palma’s film, Enos wears the pants in the relationship. Michael Pena and Giovanni Ribisi – who fill out the gangster squad – give good support.
Still, the not quite predictable highlight of the film is Sean Penn’s Mickey Cohen. In pitching the movie to the media Fleischer and co. have taken real pains to point out that Gangster Squad’s Cohen is a mythic construct. Which is an elaborate way of saying they’re playing it for grit and giggles. Penn’s famed energy and ability to pump something odd and unusual into the most mundane of roles has been a real asset in the past: look at what he did in Carlito’s Way and Mystic River. In Gangster Squad he’s so oversized it tips the movie over; but at least it seems a piece with Fleischer’s hype.
Penn’s not doing a 'character’ he’s performing some monstrous form of baroque pantomime in homage to Great Movie Gangster’s of the Past. In Penn here, you can see James Cagney, Paul Muni even Robert de Niro. There’s one hilarious bit where he’s out to intimidate an adversary; the scene plays in a restaurant. I wasn’t worried about Cohen’s intended victim; I was more concerned over whether the glamourous setting would survive intact Penn’s scenery chewing. Whenever Penn and Gosling and Stone aren’t on screen, the movie folds, despite all the gunplay and the wild and beautiful camerawork of Dion Beebe.
Gangster Squad is an odd, unsettling mix. The film looks and feels like a live action cartoon channeling a video game. If that sounds inhuman and soul-less it is.
Share
