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Coming from Brian De Palma, the guy who directed Scarface starring AL Pacino, this movie blow your mind in the other way, as it lacked dialog, lacked suspense, lacked performances, lacked even the basic elements to make a movie memorable.
With A-listers all around like Robert De Niro at his peak and Sean Connery the old and better, this movie should be one of the best gangsta flicks there is, but talent should meet talent at the other end, otherwise, we would have a very cold unpolished movie with no suspense and not even one decent performance.
It's a movie about the legend AL Capone (played by Robert De Niro), a very intimidating mafia boss who control the illegal trading of alcohol during it's prohibition in Chicago in the early 30's, determine to stop him is the newly appointed treasury officer Eliot Ness (played by Kevin Costner), but in a corrupted city, with corrupted policemen, Ness find it to be very hard to assemble the right crew to help him, so he find Jim Malone (played by Sean Connery) who's an old and wise foot patrol policeman.
After assembling the right crew, which consists of Jim Malone, an accountant named Oscar Wallace and a new cop named George Stone (played by Andy Garcia), the four decide to stop an alcohol trafficking at the Canadian-American border, with the help of the Canadian police, a scene which should be the most important one in the entire movie, had so many flaws, it left me speechless.
The scene was very weak and unbalanced, and it was really obvious to see that, the four cops were hiding in a cottage on the american side and the Canadian cops were hiding behind the mountains on the Canadian side, and they were both monitoring the gang members trading boxes of alcohol on the bridge connecting Canada with the U.S, so you see the Canadian police on their horses raiding the bridge, at the same time the four cops starts raiding the bridge too, but it took the Canadian cops few minutes to reach the bridge and start shooting, and it took forever for the four cops to reach the bridge, so after the shoot out started, the gang members starts fleeing to the american side only to see the four cops in their way, the camera cuts to the american side and shows you the shoot out between the four cops and the gang members, and it never cut back to the Canadian cops, so you don't know what happened to them, i mean they came from the other side of the bridge riding horses, so what happened to them? did they shoot some gang members?, did they got shot? did they disappear? because that's the only explanation, the shoot out on the american side took along time, but the Canadian cops never reached the other side of the bridge, it's like they jumped off to the water and died.
Robert De Niro's performance as Al Capone was incredible, he was very intimidating while on screen, he had the laugh, and the accent and he was the best thing about this movie, the problem is, he had no screen time at all, he had very few lines and his character isn't even in a supporting role, it was a cameo, which is very shocking when you realize that the best thing about this movie came from a cameo, instead, we have Kevin Costner playing as a family man, delivering one of the worst performances, I've seen in a long time, how he was casted in supposedly a strong gangsta flick was beyond comprehension, he wasn't even able to deliver the most important punchlines in the movie, he was very weak and pathetic, furthermore, Sean Connery performance was very awkward, his Irish-American accent was laughable, it comes very strong at some scenes and it disappear on the other scenes, so how he won an academy award with that accent is terrifying.
Now, i might have trashed this movie more than others, and the reason for it, is that this is a gangsta flick, a movie about mafia should never come off this weak and/or mediocre, it's a movie about AL Capone, in which AL Capone was not in it, and the leading man was horribly casted , and the movie lacked dialog, the screenplay was very weak, there were too many scenes when you expect something to be said, but it didn't, it's like they didn't speak to each-other unless it was absolutely necessary, and the confrontations were one sided for the most cases, the whole atmosphere was cold, you'd expect some sound-effects to go with these car chases, but it was awfully silent, the only thing to make up was the beautiful cinematography, the beautiful music and the very few scenes with Robert De Niro.
Overall, a very weak and unmemorable movie who lacked many elements, in which it came off laughable when it shouldn't, and it wasn't funny when it should, because Kevin Costner couldn't deliver the fucking punchline in a proper or at least in an exciting way, this guy should never be in a serious movie.
6/10
