Review of A Bronx Tale (1993) by Tomas T — 25 Aug 2012

The veteran actor Robert De Niro's debut directing, A Bronx Tale from 1993, tells a simple coming of age tale from New York suburbs. Robert De Niro is certainly more renown for his extended actor career than directing, but as it happens he turns out to be a solid story teller as well.

Set in the 1960's New York, the film follows the life of Calogero 'C' Anello, a young Italian American, as he grows up idolizing the local gangsters; especially the local kingpin Sonny LoSpecchio (Chazz Palminteri) who takes Calogero under his wing early on. Calogero's actual father, Lorenzo Anello (Robert De Niro) naturally disapproves his son's new notorious father figure which sets the film's power triangle in place. Both of C's father figures raise him to become an upstanding citizen from their divergent perspectives. This adds a strong moralistic tone for the film which is something bit unexpected from a crime drama film.

As stated in the beginning, A Bronx Tale is a simple coming of age film which also contains all the cliches found in past mafia films. This does not render the film automatically bad, in fact the director manages to keep the interest rate high thanks to good balance of drama and fast paced screenplay and scenes changes . The simple story however makes A Bronx Tale as predictable as a film can be. Added to this I found the moralistic mafioso Sonny somewhat peculiar in the film. I mean a moralistic gangster kingpin just feels misplaced!

Despite the simple story, the film also deals with abundant amount of subjects from criminality to racism which add up interest rate. Even so, A Bronx Tale might not raise to the levels of the mafia classics such as Casino, Godfathers etc, but it is a worthy addition to the genre and definitely worth checking out.