A chronicle of the LAPD's fight to keep East Coast Mafia types out of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s.
Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad desperately, desperately wants to be The Untouchables. Its plotline hits every one of the same beats, bringing together an immensely likeable cast to form a ragtag, off-the-books police squad and pitching them against a revered Hollywood heavyweight in the role of an iconic outlaw with all the scenery he could ever want to chew and it takes just as much delight both in its period setting and its genre, recreating prohibition America with meticulous detail and packing it full of blazing Tommy guns and swanky cars in much the same way as Untouchables did some twenty-five years ago. In short, it follows the exact recipe DePalma used back in 1987 to the letter and uses similarly impressive ingredients as Fleischer himself is joined by Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn & Emma Stone. And yet, the end product is almost entirely flavourless.
Though the film has no shortage of little problems - supposedly snappy dialogue that fails to pop, an over-fondness for CGI and the absence of a single main character worthy of the actor playing them - the essence of its failure is simply that the man behind the camera seems like he would rather have been making a different film altogether. Back in 2009, as the rage for all things horror got into full swing and a hoard of zombie fiction was rampaging through society, devouring brains across the globe, Fleischer cunningly seized the opportunity to make his directorial debut and drop the entire genre on its head with the cleverly subversive Zombieland. In doing so, he took a much beloved but greatly oversaturated sub-genre and energetically dissected it: mocking its little absurdities and oddities without sneering at or belittling it but simply as a fan finding the fun in its more ridiculous elements. The premise of Gangster Squad is so deliciously clichéd that it would seem the perfect opportunity for him to bring his satirical talents to one of the most iconic genres in American cinema but, unfortunately, this potential goes entirely untapped as the film never quite enters the realm of actual parody, instead occupying a kind of dead zone between sincere gangster epic and sardonic caricature. In doing so, it becomes laughably clichéd and predictable without ever actually asking the viewer to laugh at its clichés and predictability.
The film's identity crisis is manifested most obviously in its cardboard cut-outs characters. When your following the well-worn "assembling a team to defeat the villain" story structure, it's okay to make use of certain archetypes but building your squad exclusively of them, and of particularly uninspired iterations of them at that, is never going to end well: Gangster Squad might have been better eschewing names altogether and simply referring to its heroes as "The Old One", "The Ethnic One", "The Handsome One" etc. Each character is introduced with a single defining attribute and never for a moment threatens to grow beyond it.
It's always a shame to see talent going to waste and here Fleischer has assembled a great cast and then given them nothing to work with: Josh Brolin is asked merely to brood quietly and spout the odd righteous cliché, Emma Stone to smile slyly in a scintillating red dress and Michael Pena simply to look sufficiently Mexican. The only highlight is Sean Penn's cartoonish portrayal of Cohen which, whilst utterly over-the-top and seldom genuinely menacing, is an awful lot of fun as we see one of Hollywood's more serious thespians blow of some steam as a good old fashioned bad guy. On the flipside, it's particularly frustrating to watch Gosling & Stone's stilted romance after seeing them sizzle together in Crazy, Stupid, Love. Having to witness the chemistry these two share sapped by a lifeless script might just be the worst of this movie's sins.
The vacuum of original thought extends to the visuals as well. Though it's clear that a lot of time and no small amount of cash has gone into lusciously recreating forties LA, the movie suffers from that same fallacy which trips up a lot of modern filmmakers: the notion that expense is a substitute for style. The entire film is drenched in a glitzy gloss, the costumes are gorgeous and the action sequences are overflowing with slow-motion shots of things exploding but it's all done in a rather workmanlike fashion. Each scene is perfectly presentable in itself but it's completely forgotten by the time the next one has arrived: there's no inspiration, no flair and nothing really to catch the eye or inflame the imagination. It's not an ugly film, it's just not very interesting to look at.
By refusing to take advantage of the familiarity of its story and characters to satirise cookie-cutter crime films, Gangster Squad unwittingly becomes one. A rigid adherence to a story we all know and characters we couldn't possibly care about is too much to be rescued even by the collective talents of Fleisher, Gosling et al. As current "King of all Hollywood", when even Ryan Gosling can't save you're film, you've really messed up bad. Fleisher still retains enough of the credibility Zombieland bought him to make whatever he turns his hand to next worth checking out but another misstep of this magnitude could see that well run dry.
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Please note this is a region 2 DVD and will require a region 2 (Europe) or region Free DVD Player in order to play. Los Angeles, 1949. Ruthless, Brooklyn-born mob king Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) runs the show in this town, reaping the ill-gotten gains from the drugs, the guns, the prostitutes and, if he has his way, every wire bet placed west of Chicago. And he does it all with the protection of not only his own paid goons, but also the police and the politicians who are under his control. It’s enough to intimidate even the bravest, street-hardened cop--except, perhaps, for the small, secret crew of LAPD outsiders led by Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) and Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), who come together to try to tear Cohen’s world apart.
Crime drama set in the 1940s and '50s in Los Angeles inspired by the real life story of vicious mob boss Mickey Cohen and the LAPD officers who tried to bring him down. After moving to LA from the East Coast, Cohen (Sean Penn) has taken control of the town. A force to be reckoned with, he not only has his gang to do his bidding but a number of policemen and politicians are also under his command. Police Chief Bill Parker (Nick Nolte) instructs Sergeant John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) to wage war against Cohen and his men. With only a small squad which includes his colleague, Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), O'Mara attempts to regain control of the city. Meanwhile, Wooters gets involved with the mobster's girlfriend, Grace Faraday (Emma Stone), which, if discovered, will only serve to enrage Cohen further.
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