Directed by: Brian de Palma
Grade: C+
The Untouchables was the movie that was able to so effortlessly portray the Prohibition-era Chicago in the 30’s, adding spices of humor amongst the fast-moving storyline and brutal themes that dominate the film. The film has become renowned for its stylish feel, glamorous set pieces and alluring locations. In this way, the Untouchables, visually, has an accurate approach to the Prohibition-era. On the consequent side, the entire film also feels exceedingly stagy, as if every line spoken, every bullet fired, and every movement taken has already been planned out and prepared for before it actually happens.
The film’s premise is thoroughly intriguing, as it somewhat follows the true-life exploits of the Untouchables: a team of policemen, led by Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), who brought down Al Capone’s extensive empire. The film plays out as classic gangster: good guys vs. the bad guys, corruption in the police, and Tommy Guns blazing the whole time.
Director Brian de Palma is all over the modish of this film, and he undeniably succeeds on this facet of the movie. As I talked about in the first paragraph, the film looks real in its interpretation of the 1930s, ranging from vehicles, to uniforms, to buildings and to guns. Sean Connery, conveying the best performance in the film as the experienced Irish-American cop Malone, delivers a number of memorable one liners that make his character immediately likeable. His line: “What are you prepared to do?”, serves as the foundation for the film’s own code of principles. Robert de Niro, as Al Capone, is equally intimidating in his scenes.
The locations where de Palma shoots the film are striking. There’s an exciting scene at a bridge on the U.S-Canadian border, where Ness’s team and a force of Canadian Mounties engage in a firefight with Capone’s men, and in the aftermath of the shootout, Malone shoots an already dead gangster through the mouth when the only surviving criminal refuses to give in. Even more reputable is the train station sequence, which is vigorously energetic as Ness shoots it out with a team of mobsters while trying to catch a baby in a carriage quickly moving on down the stairs.
However, even as the Untouchables shows off its valuable efficiencies, it just as soon begins to unveil a number of disadvantages. While the story is plainly told, nearly everything already feels set up before it takes place. In other words, the film feels routinely scheduled, such as the police raids on the gangster’s holdouts and the way each individual scene is played out. As a result, there is a considerable lack of profundity to be found throughout the piece.
I am also very dubious over the dialogue spoken in the film. While Connery and de Niro take all the preeminent one-liners, the rest of the cast are left with short pieces of routine dialogue that don’t contribute at all to the film’s vigor: after Ness guns down a gangster with his shotgun in self-defense, he screams: “What are you, deaf!? What is this, a game!?” Oh, after sending his family away to keep them safe, Ness bluntly tells to Malone, “I want to take the fight to Capone”. And how many times must Ness bluntly, and repeatedly, shout to the gangsters, “You killed my friend!” before threatening to pull a gun on or pushing them off a building?
Things are made more complicated by the almost arbitrary scenes that pop up intermittently throughout the film involving Capone delivering a monologue to his fellow gangsters, and the syrupy scenes where Ness is with his family. The scenes with Capone thrive in showing the type of man Capone was (alas though his rambling speeches become too repetitive), and the scenes with Ness in his household with his family are an honest attempt at allowing us to care more for the character. The problem with both of these is that they are not placed correctly in the sequence of events, and therefore show up at random. These scenes are either needless at worse or a little reasonable at best, but either way they are a pestilence to the film’s progress.
I am typing this review a day after watching the Untouchables for a second time. What’s shocking here is that after my first viewing of the film, about a year back from my second, I did recognize a few flaws that need to be taken into account, but I still couldn’t help from finding respect for the Untouchables as a gangster film! I gave the film a solid B and moved on. It was in my second viewing of the movie that I began to realize blemishes that I either did not recognize or did not even bother to care about from before. As a result, I must admit to having lost a great deal of esteem for the Untouchables after my second viewing then from my first.
Ultimately, the Untouchables is a movie that is held in contrast to itself: the whimsical performance given by the capricious Costner vs. the absolutely genuine performances that are solidly delivered by Connery and de Niro; the inconsistent, delicate home sequences that try, neurotically, to find sentimental values for the main character when the rest of the film is drastically mature (and therefore very realistic!) in its tenor; the film's stagy character set up compared to it's vivid Prohibition-era onscreen portrayal; and the deficient amount of insight to be found when this is a mobster-drama. De Palma inserts a lot of energy into the film, and as a result the film is vigorously entertaining from start to finish. Unfortunately, the Untouchables is great on the outside but isn’t all that well on the inside, and therefore there isn’t much to separate it from de Palma’s other motion pictures.
C+
No comments:
Post a Comment