Review of Gangster Squad (2013) by Matthew H — 05 Feb 2014

(4/10).

If there's one word that describes Gangster Squad accurately, it's messy. The film has a plot that's fairly inconsistent, cardboard characters that are impossible to care about, mediocre acting from everyone involved and a truly awful script. If there's one thing the film does right, it's visual style and sense of time and location. The movie has a very cool aesthetic and I do like it's visual style, but I just wish it was used in a better film. The film also has a great cast including Josh Brolin, Emma Stone, Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Giovanni Ribisi, Chris Pena and more, but the writing is so bad that none of them have time to shine or develop as characters.

When I first saw the trailer for this film, I was extremely excited for it. It looked like it could be great with all the talent involved, but then the bad reviews started coming in. Even through the bad reviews, I was still curious to see it because it still looked pretty good to me. This film is disappointing on most levels and I completely forgot I watched it 2 hours after the movie finished. If your movie is that forgettable, that's a huge problem.

The worst part of the film is probably the writing. The scriptwriters don't bother with continuity or developing characters so it's very hard to root for the gangster squad. The dialogue wavers from mediocre to downright awful and it's incredibly cartoony and stereotypical 40's dialogue. This movie is literally a cartoon that doesn't know it's a cartoon. Even Sean Penn, one of the greatest and most reliable actors of all time, is a full-fledged scenery-chewing cartoon. His portrayal of Mickey Cohen is so off-the-wall and random that it's mostly just confusing and hard to take seriously. His villain is more cartoony than a Looney Toon's villain and he always talks like he's trying to hold in a shit.

Overall, avoid this movie. I didn't remember it 2 hours after it finished and it is very disappointing. Gangster Squad is a live-action cartoon, and a bad one at that.