An all-star cast wasted by guns
Lacklustre script fails to build drama
Starring: Josh Brolin, Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone Directed by: Ruben Fleischer Running time: 113 minutes
Parental advisory: Frequent violence
Playing at: Banque Scotia, Cavendish, Colossus, Côte des Neiges, Kirkland,
Lacordaire, LaSalle, Marché Central, Sources, Sphèretech, Taschereau cinemas
Oh the horror. The horror: So much fuss over such a flop.
Gangster Squad was supposed to come out last year, but recuts were ordered after the tragedy in Aurora, Colo., because the trailers showed gangsters opening fire at an audience of moviegoers.
That bloodbath has been excised entirely from the motion picture, and it does not suffer in the least, because the last thing this movie needed was more violence.
A gratuitously gory endeavour that opens with a cheesy voice-over and a scene featuring a man pulled in half by a nasty mobster, this cheap return to The Untouchables wastes no time getting gritty.
Director Ruben Fleischer is going for noir chic, so he drenches his frames in graphic violence to give his central villain (Sean Penn) some jagged teeth — and that was just his first miscalculation.
Instead of wasting time and money shooting all these special effects action sequences, Fleischer would have been better advised to rely on his all-star cast to carry the narrative.
Sean Penn doesn’t need any help conveying edge. And Josh Brolin doesn’t need any help looking tough and just a little vacant. And really, if there’s only one trigger we want to see Ryan Gosling pull, it’s not on a gun.
Obviously, the gangster genre demands guns and violence. But filmmakers today seem to have lost grasp of the cinematic weapon in hand: It’s not about the gun or the gore, it’s about how far people will go to get what they want.
That’s what makes movies interesting. Which explains why this movie is such a complete yawner.
Despite the solid premise of a hand-picked crime fighting squad waging a guerrilla war against the mob, this lacklustre script fails to build characters around its central good-vs.-evil dilemma.
We’re supposed to be terrified for our heroes and their families, but we barely know who they are because half the screen time is dedicated to slow-motion gunfights. And as it turns out, one gunfight looks a lot like the next.
This means things start to get slow and dreary rather quickly once Fleischer establishes the whole scenario: John O’Mara (Brolin) takes off his badge in an organized bid to get notorious gangster Mickey Cohen’s (Penn) mob out of Los Angeles.
With a little help from his wife, he pulls the right team of misfits together to get the job done — and like all misfits from central casting we get a black guy who makes jokes about Burbank, a Mexican who plays sidekick to the cowboy, a science geek who can make cool gadgets and a handsome ne’er-do-well who likes to romance the ladies.
Fleischer misses every opportunity to turn this generic, ragtag group of crime fighters into dramatic fire because the script just isn’t there.
Moreover, what is there is often laughable. Some of it doesn’t even make sense. You can tell they were trying to find language that matched the era, but the words sound moronic because these people feel too contemporary.
They lack the veneer of politesse that marked most social interaction. The script is well aware of this fact by even including an etiquette coach as the moll, and yet, the movie has all the manners of a Jersey Shore cast member.
Ironically, the only character that convincingly conjures the essence of the era is Gosling’s, and he’s supposed to be the bad boy.
The Canadian talent feels steeped in an underlying sense of decency, but everyone else feels flat, shallow and just a little dull. Even Penn, blustering beneath his prosthetically enlarged nose, is reduced to a caricature plucked from the pages of Mickey Spillane.
And have we tired of Emma Stone and her red dresses yet?
She was really cute in Easy A, but she has a hard time holding her own in the same scenes as Gosling and Penn. She feels lightweight, but it’s not entirely her fault because she was completely miscast.
In short, just about everything about this movie is wrong.
The only thing that’s right is the production design, featuring the gussied-up streets of Los Angeles in postwar pastels, old deco neon and some gorgeous old cars. Someone saw Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, but it couldn’t have been the director.
If Fleischer had seen the Jack Nicholson classic, he would have known the best way to make a thriller is to create complex and interesting characters. Not giving everyone a loaded gun.
LOS ANGELES — Gangster Squad director Ruben Fleischer was stepping out of the shower on the night of July 20 last year when he received a chilling phone call from a studio executive at Warner Bros. There had been a deadly shooting at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo. The studio was pulling the trailer for its Gangster Squad movie.
The problem was that the preview, which had been scheduled to debut before some showings of the latest Batman film that weekend, featured a peek at a pivotal moment in the 1940s truecrime romp when Los Angeles mobsters ruthlessly shoot into a movie theatre audience.
Thus began an arduous odyssey to the screen of a film loosely based on violence that occurred 60 years ago—in an eerie sequence of unhappy events, Fleischer’s movie has been affected by the real-life violence of today. Suggestive parallel incidents have dogged its journey, from the Colorado massacre that forced the reshooting of a key scene, through the mourning after the Connecticut elementary school shooting last month, to this week’s replaying of the July theatre horror in a Colorado courtroom just as the film finally prepares to open on Friday.
Fleischer couldn’t initially process what was happening in that moment when he was on the phone last summer but eventually, everyone involved with Gangster Squad agreed: The scene was just too similar and had to be cut — not just from the trailer, but also from the movie, which was set for release two months later.
“Many conversations followed that and we talked about it and very quickly decided that the appropriate action would be to take the scene out of the movie out of respect for the families who suffered that loss in the tragedy,” Fleischer said. “Because we didn’t know when we were going to come out or what was happening, we decided we have to come up with a new scene.”
So the entire movie theatre sequence featuring Josh Brolin’s hard-boiled cop John O’Mara being ambushed inside famed Hollywood movie palace Grauman’s Chinese Theater was excised from Gangster Squad.
For many of the film’s cast and crew members, it was their favourite scene in the highly stylized gangster flick, which tells the tale of the real-life tussle between offthe-books Los Angeles police officers and an army of mobsters.
“I was really impressed with Ruben (cutting the scene) because it was the best scene in the movie,” said Ryan Gosling, who plays reluctant squad member Jerry Wooters. “There was an alchemy about it. Everything came together. It was the most cinematic part of the film because it happened in a cinema, as well, but there was just something special about it.”
The scene was filmed over four nights at the real Grauman’s and outside on Hollywood Boulevard, where the shootout between the squad and the goons of mob boss Mickey Cohen (played by Sean Penn) spilled out. The iconic theatre and surrounding area was meticulously transformed for the action sequence with vintage vehicles and extras clad in period costumes.
“It was really eerie,” Brolin said of the original scene’s parallel to the real-life shooting in Aurora. “I respected and supported the decision immediately. It’s still a violent replacement. It just happens in Chinatown. It’s just as violent. It just doesn’t remind you of this thing that happened. It’s probably going to anyway because everyone knows it’s been replaced.”
Several members of the cast and crew reassembled nearly a year after filming completed on Gangster Squad to shoot the new sequence in L.A.’s Chinatown section just north of downtown.
The scene, which cost several million dollars to reshoot, fits seamlessly into the film and functions narratively in the same way as the original: Brolin’s O’Mara is ambushed, only this time by an exploding laundry truck instead of gun-toting gangsters.
The film’s debut this week coincidentally comes at the same time that 25-yearold James Holmes, who is charged with killing 12 people and injuring 70 in the July theatre shooting, is appearing at a week-long preliminary hearing to determine whether the case will be sent to trial.
“The tragedy that everyone suffered in Colorado is so much greater than having to change a scene in a movie,” Fleischer said. “I’m not going to begin to say that I suffered as a result, just in context, it’s inappropriate. We just said, ‘We have to do this.’ Luckily, all the actors made themselves available, and we got together and we figured it out together.”
There are no current plans for the original scene to resurface, but Fleischer said he would eventually like to see it put back into Gangster Squad one day.
The filmmakers are also hopeful that audiences in search of entertainment this weekend won’t have any issues separating recent reallife gun violence from the bullet-ridden adventures depicted in Gangster Squad.
“This isn’t a movie promoting violence,” said producer Dan Lin. “It’s a movie about unsung heroes. These characters were real guys who were doing the right thing, stopping gangsters and saving the city that we all love. Yes, in the cause of trying to save your city and take down the bad guys, sometimes the cops had to use guns.”