Gangster Squad: Turning the Untouchables into a Saturday Morning Cartoon

"Watch out for that new Power Ranger franchise: Power Rangers - Untouchable Gangster Squad!!"

Twenty years ago, Gangster Squad would have changed my life. I would have been a fresh teen, sneaking into a cool R-rated actioner filled with quick-witted aces, duplicitous dames, and brutal bad guys that looked and sounded just like most of the heavies from the first season of Batman the Animated Series.

Of course, that would have only happened if I never saw the Untouchables, Devil in a Blue Dress, or LA Confidential. But, at ripening old age, I have seen all of these movies, as well as countless other flicks, shows, and video games, some successful (Boardwalk Empire) and some less so (The Black Dhalia and Rockstar's L.A. Noire), which have covered this ground with greater craft and concern for verisimilitude, character, and narrative than Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad.

Mind you, I enjoy Fleischer's work. Zombieland was pretty solid for its relatively modest ambitions, and 30 Seconds or Less is a decent, if slight, diversion. However, Fleischer is purely a populist filmmaker who likely has his sights set on becoming the next Zack Snyder or Michael Bay, and he will probably be sliding into a cushy position as a middle-of-the-road journeyman whose works will inevitably display more bombast than vision. Granted, that's a bold prediction, but I offer Gangster Squad as proof. At its best, Gangster Squad is a rip-roaring good time in the vein of old school gangster B-movies, like Angels with Dirty Faces, where morality is black and white and characters are flat as paper but bullets fly as fast as the quips. At its worse, the flick is a living cartoon with simplistically insulting morality, almost zero cleverness or narrative depth (despite rich source material), and a cast of characters that seems handpicked by the Saturday Morning Cartoon Commission on Diversity.

I want to start with the characters in Gangster Squad because as a viewer with a personal awareness that a multicultural vigilante unit in 1940's LA is a deceptively pleasant fiction, that element sticks out like the sorest thumb imaginable. Despite Fleischer and crew's best efforts at reaching a broad audience and respecting global cultural diversity, there is literally no way an African-American or a Hispanic-American would have occupied a place on an elite vigilante unit in pre-Civil rights era Los Angeles, no matter how progressive California was and continues to be. As a Black man, I admit it's cool to see Anthony Mackie playing knife-slinging, smart ass cowboy/ninja/cop Coleman Harris, but I know it's BS, the special brand designed to entice the 18-35 black male demo to come out and see a movie they would have seen with or without an African-American character. Even worse, Fleischer makes only a cursory acknowledgement of the fact that Harris' presence on the squad is inherently odd. To further diminish suspension of disbelief, he adds a Mexican-American character, the colorfully named Navidad Ramirez (Michael Pena, woefully underused), who is essentially a "My Man Friday" to Robert Patrick's rootin-tootin' Yosemite Sam, Max Kennard. That said, the white boys don't fare much better, as Josh Brolin is saddled with every Irish cop stereotype in the book with the exception of red hair, as hard-fightin' and hard-drinkin' John  O'Meara. Only Giovanni Ribisi, as surveillance geek with a conscience, and Ryan Gosling narrowly escape such egregious one-dimensionality, most likely because the romantic lead has to have some semblance of depth, even if that depth only reaches into the reservoirs of Gosling's previous turns as a tiny-voiced charmer. 

Aside from its Rainbow Heroes Collective, Gangster Squad boasts a narrative with little to say and even less on its mind. Not every piece of work that graces the silver screen has to be art; we all know that, but even the pure popcorn entertainment should endeavor to be mildly clever in its progression and respectably honest  about its setting. The vigilantes and villains at the center of Gangster Squad are easily the dullest knives in the drawer, bar none. O'Meara and his squad plan to go to war with East Coast mobster Mickey Cohen, but they have only the barest of bare bones plans: take'em down head on. How about planning an attack? How about wearing masks (which only happens once and never again, leading to friends and families being put in avoidable danger)? How about killing your enemies before they kill your families? How about scouting your enemy then planning an attack where you wear masks and kill those who might kill your family? None of these options are viable; instead, the squad opts to bug Mickey Cohen's home and proceed to bulldoze through a gang war like stickup kids.Cohen, for his part, isn't much smarter, spending more time cackling and grimacing like he was auditioning for a role as one of Gotham's lesser known Batman punching bags than devising fool-proof plans to build a low-key criminal empire--his big plan is to force all West Coast gambling through a central location, because that would never catch the authorities attention. Though Penn probably enjoyed gnashing on scenery in a manner that could only rival the chomping DeNiro displayed in DePalma's The Untouchables (yes, those guys, again). 

To make matters worse, countless works of fiction and non-fiction have gone to great lengths to reveal early 20th century Los Angeles as a complex beast, one that was as affected by racial strife, drugs, crime, and police corruption as it was by the ever growing movie industry. Very little of that complexity, much less the adherent gray morality associated with such a murky period, is acknowledged on camera. If Gangster Squad was the first of its kind, it's black-white morality, in which good cops are unflinching paragons of virtue and gangsters and corrupt cops are the slime that oozes between the sidewalks, might be refreshing, even optimistic, but it exists in the shadow of more than a dozen, or more films that have dealt with the period and its complexities with greater depth, honesty, and entertainment value. Heck, one only needs to look at LA Confidential or the classic Chinatown as evidence.

So, how does Fleischer and his crew counter this lunk-headed approach to narrative and theme? With guns-a-blazing, slow-mo, nacho cheesy dialogue, and a saturated palette that makes the setting as much a cartoon as its characters. For all its faults, Gangster Squad is pretty consistent with the shoot-outs and the stabbings and the beatings. There is such quick movement from set piece to set piece, often with only the barest of rationalization, that one could ignore the lesser elements and just have a whizz-bang good time watching O'Meara and co. gun down the bad guys like the video game characters they are. For most audiences, that will be enough. For anyone with cable or over the age of 13, the proceedings of Gangster Squad will seem flashy but highly derivative. To wit, those multiple set pieces lack any sense of tension beyond the moments that encourage the audience to take bets on which character will die the tragic death that will spur our heroes to cross the line in their pursuit of the pugnacious Cohen. 

Ultimately, Gangster Squad is just the type of throwback action flick that belongs in the January doldrums, that rarefied space where we get a ton of action movies that would have easily been banished to Netflix if not for the generally empty slate studios offer in the early months of the year. Of course, it was originally scheduled for release in November, as some whispered about potential Oscar nods that would never surface, but was pushed back for reshoots after the Dark Knight Tragedy in Aurora, CO last July. As bad as it may have seemed at the time, that move was probably a blessing in disguise because now Gangster Squad seems like it might have a shot at dominating the box office without the threat of real competition,  aside from Marlon Wayans' A Haunted House--which will surely sneak up on the Squad and probably crush them. Instead of being demolished, Gangster Squad will have a clear lane to taking its place as a decidedly guilty pleasure for teenagers who have never been allowed to see a gangster flick of worth, so good job Gangster Squad cast and crew, you only had to leave your original release behind and your brains at the door to take your place in the hearts and minds of the unenlightened youth. Congrats.

Review: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Grade: B

There is a moment during the climax of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (ALVH) when Lincoln (Benjamin Walker) and his longtime friend, freed slave Will Johnson (Anthony Mackie), are fending off a small army of vampires. The camera swings around the scene in slow-mo, capturing perfect shots of the heroes standing tall against overwhelming odds with only one weapon, a tricked out axe, between them, just like the masterful montage at the climax of the Avengers.

That moment oozes cool in the way that half the shots in Zack Snyder’s 300 adaptation were meant to evoke awe rather than push the narrative forward. It is also a moment that typifies ALVH as an exercise in style over substance that works as the perfect big budget B-movie right up until director Timur Bekambetov and screenwriter Seth Graeme-Smith are forced to reign in the cool and build a narrative that manages to simultaneously trivialize Lincoln’s presidency while making it, and the Civil War, something that could only be born in the age of superhero movies and genre mashups.

Based on Graeme-Smith’s novel of the same name, ALVH traces the rise of Honest Abe, who Walker plays with the gawky earnestness and stoic gravitas that 6th graders may attribute to the 16th President, from his youth as an aspiring lawyer to his time as President during a war that threatened to tear the nation asunder, with one key difference: he spent his spare time in those days slaying hordes of the unholy undead, as he searched for the vampire who killed his mother. Trained by the mysteriously pale Henry Sturgess (Dominic Cooper, tempering a bit of the charm he brought to Howard Stark), Lincoln, armed only with his trust axe and the aid of his compatriots--the aforementioned Will Johnson (Mackie, reliably dignified and criminally underused) and slinky shopkeeper Joshua Speed (Jimmi Simpson, adding the faintest whiff of comic relief to the stoic proceedings)--Lincoln sets forth to rid America of a contingent of vampires, led by the unnaturally ageless, foppish Rufus Sewell’s Adam, who have built an empire of the backs and blood of African slaves. How clever. While clearly overextending himself with his studies, day job and night job, the future president also has time to romance the Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, smiling ) and chart a course as a politician who will change the direction of the nation. 

ALVH is at its best when Bekambetov lets the story’s freak flag fly and embraces its ridiculousness with a straight face. Bekambetov only falters with ALVH when he is forced to follow the biographical elements of the original novel and eschew the super slow-mo vampire killing that was advertised. Granted, the appeal of Graeme-Smith’s novel was based on the juxtaposition of Lincoln’s historical biography and his fictional escapades as a slayer, but this flick could have truly been a transcendent B-movie masterpiece if it embraced all the weirdness full bore. The best example of where this film detrimentally lets the historical overshadow the fantastic is Harriet Tubman’s (Jaqueline Fleming) appearance. Tubman arrives midway through the film as a “emissary” of the Underground Railroad, which is composed of slaves who have lived under vampire tyranny for centuries. Yet, Tubman is, underwhelmingly, played with near historical accuracy. Now, imagine if Tubman was also a vampire hunter who carried a silver chain to poison and kill her former vampire overlords. Over the top? Yes. Mildly disrespectful? But, an awesome revision of a historical figure that fits in the context of the narrative? Absolutely. 

Missed chances like Harriet Tubman, Vampire Slayer, as well as some notable omissions from the original novel that would have made this far more memorable, make ALVH more disappointing than it should have been. Despite Bekambetov’s attempts to reign in the eccentricities of the narrative, ALVH still easily falls into the “so insane it’s cool” camp. Much like the maligned adaptation of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman, ALVH will not be everyone’s cup of tea, as many will find it too ridiculous to be cool while some ill find it purely disrespectful. But, for those in the audience who embrace the ridiculous and survive the slower biographical moments, ALVH is a damned fun time that could have been amazing if Bekamebetov and Graeme-Smith didn’t  try to hold back the insanity.

Yin: Attempt to balance biography and horror action leads flick to be a bit (incoming pun) toothless; a tad stoic for a such an over-the-top concept, yet not Dark Knight level grim, thankfully.

Yang: Action scenes are perfectly over-the-top and delivered with shameless slow mo that shows what this flick could have been if it didn’t have to adhere to its biographical leanings; respectably promotes ridiculousness with a straight face.

In-Between: Two men. one axe. At least a dozen vampires. Almost as awesome as the Avengers versus an army of aliens. Almost.

Review - Man on a Ledge

Grade: B+

Yang: Fun mash up of heist flicks and hostage thrillers with a brisk pace, constant thrills and a few charmingly clever moments. Standout performances by Jamie Bell and Ed Harris as a smart-ass thief and a ruthless real estate tycoon.

Yin: Predictable and swimming in cliché, but still entertaining to a fault. Smart viewers will figure out all the angles halfway through, and some great talent (Anthony Mackie, Edward Burns, etc.) is woefully underused.

In-Between: Ever get that feeling of being in a high place, and you just want to jump? This film may help calm that feeling.

A few years back Colin Farrell starred in Phone Booth, a gimmicky thriller about a man trapped in a phone booth by an unseen stalker.

A few months ago, Ben Stiller starred in a Tower Heist, a hokey heist comedy about a barely competent gaggle of working class schmoes trying to rob the shady investment banker who depleted their retirement funds.

Asger Leth’s Man on a Ledge takes some of the better ideas from Phone Booth and Tower Heist and rolls them into a unseasonably entertaining thriller heist movie that succeeds despite wading neck deep in predictable plot turns and clichés.

The titular man on a ledge is Sam Worthington’s ex-con Nick Cassidy, an ex-cop who is seeking to prove his innocence by, logically, threating to jump off the 21st floor of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel. To help in his quest for self-exoneration, Cassidy enlists the aid of disgraced hostage negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks, adding to her list of dramatic roles), who is constantly second-guessed by the NYPD boys club detectives like Edward Burns’ Detective Jack Dougherty. With the local constabulary’s attention focused on Cassidy’s potential pavement dive, Jamie Bell’s Joey and girlfriend Angie (the biblical Genesis Rodriguez) stage an elaborate heist of a priceless diamond from Ed Harris’ Lex Luthor-esque real estate shark, just across the street from Cassidy’s scene. There’s no way these two events could be related, right?

While the twists are pretty well telegraphed and the characters are all archetypes firmly entrenched in hostage and heist narratives, Leth has managed to arrange these overused elements in a solidly entertaining configuration that proves to be wonderfully tense from start to finish. The key to Leth’s success is solid pacing and a welcome lack of pretension, as there’s enough light humor to keep the proceedings from becoming too dour. Man on a Ledge wastes little time getting Worthington up on the ledge and drawing all sorts of atypical griping from cranky New Yawkas. Admittedly, watching Worthington on a ledge for 90 minutes could have been excruciating, but the light intrigue of Cassidy’s motivation and the focus on the diamond heist keep the plot moving and investment high, if only because audiences are trying to figure how all the pieces fit together, which is never a bad thing. Also, it doesn’t hurt that the heist itself is a marvel of amateur larceny that makes the efforts of Ben Stiller’s Tower Heist crew seem desperately pedestrian by comparison. Suffice to say, there are very few, if any, dull moments in this flick, topped of by a climax that delivers exactly what any crowd wants from of jumper situation in fashion so spectacular that it won’t be forgotten until the bigger budget blockbusters arrive in a few months.

Man on a Ledge’s solid pacing and action is complemented by decent performances, particularly from Jamie Bell and Ed Harris, Elizabeth Banks and , to a lesser extent, Edward Burns. Bell and Harris standout as the high notes among the cast by bringing a wicked liveliness to their roles that as a brash thief and a ruthless tycoon, respectively. Banks does her best to anchor this movie as seemingly the only sane woman on the NYPD, in the process showing that she’s becoming increasingly comfortable expanding her range beyond comedy with an earnest, smart performance. Burns balances his trademarks smarm with some reasonable charm as one of the few detectives who’ll abide Mercer’s hunches.

Conversely, star Sam Worthington and second leading lady, Genesis Rodriguez, are the weak links with Rodriguez faring slightly better than Worthington, who is continuing to find ways to avoid acting in favor of dropping his voice and glowering. Rodriguez, unfortunately, is mostly called upon to show off her assets and play-up the spicy Latina stereotype. Luckily, she gets to offset those less-than-pleasant stereotypes by being one of the more competent and perceptive characters. Anthony Mackie is also on hand, skulking around the periphery as Cassidy’s former partner who seems to be more than he lets on, in a role that sadly handicaps Mackie’s wonderful energy and range. Thankfully, the brisk pacing, unrelenting tension and energetic set pieces more than make up for the weaker performances.

Admittedly, as a January release, expectations for Man on a Ledge are probably low, but this flick will surprise audiences. Sure, Leth’s not reinventing the wheel when it comes to neither the hostage nor the heist genre, but he has mashed the two up into a fun exercise that is fairly clever and consistently enjoyable. The typical disclaimer for flicks like this is that not every movie has to be a masterpiece or a blockbuster. And, that’s true. Man on a Ledge may not be slickest, cleverest, most profound, or revelatory entry into the hostage/heist thriller, but it is slick enough, clever enough, and entertaining enough to get more than a few gasps, chuckles and cheers from its audiences.

Review - Real Steel

Grade: B

Yang: Awesome robot-on-robot violence that rivals Transformers; a surprisingly heartwarming story centered on human beings rather than CGI creations; a classic Speilbegian tale of a boy with daddy issues and his robot.

Yin: Jackman is playing Wolverine with a kid; the kid (Dakota Goyo) is a love-hate character; May insult Transformers fans with its ambitions to replicate over-the-top robot action; a classic Speilbegian tale of a boy with daddy issues and his (fill in the blank with fantastic creature).

In-Between: The main robot, Atom, learns to dance like Justin Bieber. Take that as you will.

Who watches boxing these days? Honestly. I occasionally hear people talking vaguely about organizing a fight party, but, outside of a few whispers from folks old enough to remember when Mike Tyson was actually a pugilist, I don’t hear much in the public consciousness about the sweet science. The media has, in particular, long left the sport behind, with the most recent kerfuffle over the Mayweather-Ortiz bout being the most significant ping on the cultural radar in years. So, when Hugh Jackman’s character, ex-prize fighter Charlie Kenton, in the new Rock’em Sock’em Robots movie (and make no mistake, this is Rock’em Sock’em Robots: The Movie), Real Steel, tells his son Max (the chipper, fey, Bieber-esque Dakota Goyo) that the fight game left humans behind decades ago, it’s a not-so-subtle commentary on the very real phenomenon of sports fandom abandoning boxing.

Despite sports fans generally ignoring the once-dominant spectacle of pro boxing in favor of MMA tourneys, moviegoers have not abandoned movies about boxers. In the past year, audiences have seen awards heaped on David O. Russell’s The Fighter while smaller pictures like the MMA drama Warrior draw consistently positive reviews. Why? My theory: America, despite being top dog for decades, has always loved an underdog story, even more so now that the country is sliding right into underdog status among world powers. Real Steel is the perfect flick to satiate that taste and it does so by combining the mainstream audience’s ‘love’ for a calculated combination of gloss and heart. Run Transformers into Rocky, add a dash of Over the Top and a pinch of The Iron Giant and witness the unsurprisingly fun, but shockingly heartfelt, Real Steel.

Real Steel follows Jackman’s Charlie Kenton as he scrapes out a living by fighting remote-controlled giant robots with jackhammers for fists and wicked names like Ambush, Zeus, Midas and Noisy Boy. Kenton is a bit of a deadbeat, a could’ve-been-contender with a propensity for welching on debts. When he loses two robots to separate hubris-inspired tragedies, he is forced to find something, anything, to keep him in the game. To complicate matters, the son he long abandoned, Max, has resurfaced after the death of his mother, one of Charlie’s old girlfriends. Forced to hold onto Max for the summer after making a deal with his son’s adoptive parents, Charlie is now backed into a corner where he just may have to bond with the son he never wanted to know. Things turn around for the Kenton boys when a trip to scrap yard leads them to discover Atom, a sparring robot with a smile carved into its faceplate and, maybe, a soul. Atom is special because he is the rare robot who doesn’t require remote control—he shadowboxes—and can, literally, take a licking and keep on ticking. With a new robot in tow, the three begin a journey to learn about each other—Charlie and Max teach Atom how to fight, and dance like Justin Bieber, while Max teaches Charlie how to be a father—and climb their way from unknowns to genuine contenders, in the ring and in life.

Real Steel seems terribly hokey at first glance. Nobody asked for a Rock’em Sock’em Robots movie, but now we have it, and it’s so much fun that it qualifies as something audiences didn’t know they wanted. This is a far better merging of the Speilbergian, an executive producer on the film, ethos with contemporary tastes than Super 8 ever was. The fights, alone, are amazing. Taking a note from Michael Bay’s Transformer epics and delivering ridiculous robot-on-robot violence in far clearer manner. Director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum I and II, and Date Night) shows a much better command of an action scene with CGI ‘bots than Bay did on his first time out. While Steel doesn’t come anywhere close to the carnage of Transformers, particularly Dark of the Moon’s assault on Chi-town, it is still frenetic and colorful enough to match, and surpass, some of Transformers' lesser action scenes.

One thing Real Steel has over Transformers is the necessity of the human performances. Real Steel is about people first and that bodes well for the schmaltzier material, which keeps scenes between humans from appearing like a stopgap. Jackman is adequate as washed up ne’er-do-well, but much of what he brings to the table is just toned-down Wolverine. Dakota Goyo actually carries more of the movie as Max, building a makeshift father-son relationship with Atom that recall’s Brad Bird’s underrated animated classic The Iron Giant. While Goyo carries a lot more of the film than the trailers would lead one to believe, he can be grating. His character was obviously based of the kids from 80's blockbusters, either total enthusiasm or overwrought attitude and angst. There will be no in-between in how audiences respond to him. He’s either adorable or insufferable. Evangeline Lily shows up for a few scenes as the daughter of Charlie’s former trainer who probably, definitely is in love with Charlie, but offers little more than a voice of concern or support when necessary. The ever-reliable Anthony Mackie is also hanging around the edges of the proceedings as an underground fight promoter, being underutilized, as usual.

Thankfully, the story has enough heart to overrun the stock performances. The underdog fight plot and the father-son reconciliation threads are typically win-win scenarios, and those threads are even more effective when woven together. Audiences may not be moved to tears, but even the most jaded viewers will feel that weird warmth in their left ventricle, if only for a second. Between the solid action and legit amount of heartwarming, Real Steel proves to be a surprisingly entertaining, and slyly moving, summer flick stranded in the middle of Oscar season. It may not knock audiences out, but it will surely make them smile.