Critical Dan

Last night I caught Gangster Squad with some friends and while it had moments of fun, overall I wouldn’t recommend paying full price for a ticket.

Gangster Squad is about a Los Angeles cop, played by Josh Brolin, recruited by the Chief of Police to form a SECRET task force, the Gangster Squad, to take down the powerful gangster Mickey Cohen, played by Sean Penn, before he takes over the city. The movie moves so quickly that Brolin recruits his crew: an old cowboy type, a nerd, a black guy, a Mexican guy and Ryan Gosling, and has the operation running within the first thirty minutes or so. They’re an odd combination, the squad, but it seems to work as they go about trying to take down different Cohen businesses in montage. The essential line using their colloquial title, the gangster squad, isn’t even an important or cinematically interesting moment, with one of them throwing out the name in a drunk toast, nothing more. Throughout the movie, the characters are constantly mentioning “the war” just so it’s obnoxiously clear to the audience that these men have “seen some things”, even if they all look fresher than a new deck of cards. This clunky plot device is only one piece of the terrible puzzle, but when all the pieces clunk, ineptitude is hard to tune out. I don’t want to blame the actors because the substance simply isn’t there for them to work with, but they all felt on auto-pilot. I suppose much is never expected from the first major movie of the year; it’ll be forgotten by March and once these actors deliver better quality work in other features, this won’t even be a blip on their resumes. With all the predictable and ordinary story developments leading to the film’s expected conclusion, I left feeling like I’d seen the most generic gangster film ever made.

The entire movie seemed to work consciously to throw as much violence on screen as possible. The opening scene shows a man torn apart by two cars and it doesn’t relent, with the completely arbitrary decisions from the filmmakers of which acts of violence warranted graphic detail. Faced with the gruesome violence ever-present in this film, my mind is drawn to a comment made on a recent episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour. Concisely, the point made was that violence seems to be moving out of the cultural zeitgeist and that we’ll see a tiring of violence in popular culture in the near future. I must agree and hope we’re headed in a more enlightened direction. I’m not trying to be a prude; I just think filmmakers use violence gratuitously and in ways that allow them to avoid serious story and character development. This entire movie felt like a quick sprint from one piece of action to another and the audience almost never had a chance to delve into any character too deeply. Poor Emma Stone was so ancillary to the plot my guess is they shot her scenes in one day. If anything, I wish we’d at least had more scenes with Brolin’s character’s wife, played by Mireille Enos, because I found her internal conflict with her husband’s work and safety, although well-worn territory, the most in-depth story available.. Trust me, that isn’t saying much.

I must say though, the most unsettling aspect of the whole affair was Sean Penn’s prosthetic face. More disconcerting than Joseph Gordon Levitt’s in Looper and Mickey Rourke’s in real life, Penn’s face seemed better suited among the cast of Dick Tracy or a nuclear waste facility. I don’t know how well I handled Sean Penn’s performance for that matter either. While a highly skilled dramatic actor, in a role like this he’s an intolerably comic character. Even as a vicious monster, he character is such a joke I can’t take his evil actions seriously on any real level and it immediately starts to slide into the world of Camp.

Best of luck on your next projects to all of those involved.