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What Are We Doing Here, Alto Knights?
On paper, a mob drama starring Robert De Niro as two of history’s biggest gangsters might have worked. But the results are borderline disastrous.
That may be one explanation for the phony structural razzle-dazzle that bogs down Barry Levinson’s period crime drama, which stars Robert De Niro as both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, two of New York’s most legendary mob bosses. The movie delivers a lot of exposition — you might even learn some basic mafia history watching it — but it rushes through characters and incidents with such awkward abandon that one wonders if it was hacked to pieces from something larger, or if it was maybe never a fully realized work to begin with. Perhaps more important, they share a producer: the great Irwin Winkler ( Raging Bull, Rocky), who has been trying to get this project made since 1974, back when the late Pete Hamill was supposed to write it.
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