Review: Gangster Squad (2013)

While audiences and reviewers wring their hands over Zero Dark Thirty's use of torture to combat terrorism, up drives Gangster Squad--a fully-loaded love letter to police brutality from Ruben Fleischer, director of that delightful gun-toting, double-tapping Twinkie advertisement, Zombieland. 

And you know what a love letter to police brutality is: it's a lot of bullets from a lot of guns.

I actually loved Zombieland. What's painful about Gangster Squad isn't that it's a terrible movie, because it's not--it's often really exciting and thrilling and funny--it's that with a better writer and director, it might have been a classic. There are polite nods in Gangster Squad to superior films like L. A. Confidential and Chinatown, but there's an inescapable silliness to the over-the-top writing and extreme violence (complete with, yes, Matrix-style slow-motion of bullet shells dropping to the floor and Christmas tree ornaments shattering) that drag the proceedings down into generic action film territory.

A lot in Gangster Squad reminds me of better films: Jon Polito shows up as a rival of Mickey Cohen's, and his big scene echoes a pivotal scene in the far superior Miller's Crossing; Michael Pena shows up to play a gunslinger-in-training, but he's not nearly as good as he is in End of Watch (itself a much more sophisticated piece of LAPD propaganda); and the whole thing never steps out of the shadow of Brian de Palma's Al Capone takedown film, The Untouchables.

It's too bad, because Sean Penn steps into the ring and plays infamous Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen with the energy of a man set to prove that his boxing days are far from over. Penn's Cohen is a pitch-black performance, soaked in evil brine, and he burns with such an intensity the film cannot help but find a grim momentum. Josh Brolin's do-gooder doppelganger, Sergeant O'Mara, has a knack for violence and a physical appearance that suggests a commonality between criminal and cop born out more by weapon choice and haircut than by screen presence; while I've liked Brolin a lot in past films, he's boring here, and badly outclassed by Penn. Brolin is likewise upstaged by the film-stealing Ryan Gosling, whose bad-boy cop Jerry flirts with disaster by intentionally courting Cohen's girlfriend Grace (why are they always named Grace?), played vacuously by gun-moll standee Emma Stone. Yet Penn and Gosling are so good in their roles that they almost make the film worth watching. They almost make you care.

Almost.

I love a good violent movie, but there are too many hackneyed plot contrivances here. I give it a few points for the moment Brolin's nagging wife decides to help him choose the recruits for his gang of above-the-law vigilantes, but even despite a few other mild tweaks to its all-too-standard tropes, Gangster Squad remains formulaic, despite its talented lead actors.


Film Stack Rating: 3/5

Gangster Squad is rated R, for lots of violence and language.