Gangster Squad (15)

**

When I left the cinema screening, the only emotion I felt after seeing ‘Gangster Squad’ was that of disappointment. The film boasts an all-star cast and a gangster-based premise that films such as ‘The Untouchables’ and ‘L.A. Confidential’ manage so well. Unfortunately, ‘Gangster Squad’ will not go down as a classic of the gangster genre.

The scene is set in Los Angeles, 1949 – an apparently drunken and immoral city in the grips of Micky Cohen’s regime. In the opening scene, we see Cohen (Sean Penn) disposing of a man who has angered him in a method taken directly from ‘The Hitcher’, and that is essentially the problem with the film – there is nothing original about it. Josh Brolin plays Police Sergeant John O’Mara, a war hero who has returned home to find his city lost to ‘an Eastern crook’. His character is so one-dimensional it is impossible to find him realistic – he willing puts his pregnant wife in danger throughout the film, only sending her away in the final act. His left-hand man, Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling, with a distractingly high-pitched voice) refers to him as an ‘angel’, but the only word I can think to describe him would be ‘annoying’.

The other characters fit the stereotypical moulds found in other such films. Gosling’s Wooters is the handsome ladies-man who is able to woo Cohen’s piece of arm candy (Emma Stone) without even trying. After one night of passion, we are then meant to believe in their relationship but this becomes problematic as we are never given time to know the characters before the main plot begins. Other members of the ‘Gangster Squad’ are equally as bland: there’s the ‘old man with a history, who also happens to be a crack shot’; the ‘old man’s apprentice, who must gain the approval of the afore-mentioned gentleman’; the ‘family man who isn’t really too sure about all this killing but happens to be great at technology’; as well as the ‘ethnic minority character’ who has taken it on himself to police the black areas of the city single-handedly. There is barely any character development here, which seems as shame as the actors have all been recognised as good screen presences. One can’t help but feel that if more time had been spent at the start of the movie building the characters up, then the film could have at least been a more personable experience. But, no… Even Sean Penn as the all-powerful Cohen cannot save the film – he just isn’t threatening enough and has very little of the gravitas that Robert De Niro exercises as Al Capone in ‘The Untouchables’.

Other problems lie in the script itself. The metaphor of the war to describe what is happening in Los Angeles is used so regularly that it loses the effect it was ever meant to have. Similarly, at the beginning of the film the characters use such bizarre phrases to describe the situations they find themselves in that it becomes almost laughable. However, there is no comedy to be found here, even in the bodged hit on the casino and failed escape from prison. As I said, everything has been done before and with twice as much wit and finesse.  The moment in which a radio device is planted in Cohen’s house is so ridiculous that it made me want to throw up my hands is disbelief, but that was only the beginning of such errors.

It seems such a shame that director Ruben Fleischer, director of the well-judged and often hilarious ‘Zombieland’, could not make something original from such a cast as this, but as it stands, ‘Gangster Squad’ is a rather boring ramble into the lives of characters you care nothing about.