Review of Gangster Squad (2013) by Thegodfatherson — 13 May 2013

The rapidly expanding Los Angeles of the 1940s and 50s the time when the aeronautics industry was becoming prominent, the freeway system being built, Disneyland was launched and the Chicago and east coast mob was moving in on Nevada and southern California has become a favourite subject of the period crime film these past 20 years.

It began with Barry Levinson's Bugsy, set in this new criminal milieu, and Lee Tamahori's Mulholland Falls, which centred on the ruthless cops hired to tackle these largely Jewish newcomers (known as the "Kosher Nostra").

It continued with two films based on James Ellroy's fact-based novels, LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia. The vicious New York gangster and former featherweight boxer Mickey Cohen came west via Chicago, sent by Murder Inc's Meyer Lansky to assist Ben "Bugsy" Siegel.

In Bugsy, Cohen was on his way up in the mid-1940s and impersonated by Harvey Keitel, and in LA Confidential, when at his 50s peak, by Paul Guilfoyle. In the naive, heavy-handed, handsomely designed Gangster Squad, he's played as a preening, psychopathic monster by Sean Penn.

We first see him using two cars to tear a Chicago interloper in two behind the "Hollywoodland" sign, thus establishing him as the monster who's corrupting the pure, law-abiding Los Angeles. The film is virtually a cross between those 1970s thrillers in which Vietnam veterans return home to clean up their tarnished homeland and Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, where Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness recruits an elite band of cops to break Al Capone's stranglehold hold on prohibition Chicago.