Review of The Godfather Part III (1990) by Trailesque — 11 Feb 2018

It is not as awful as I remember it being, but the final film in the Godfather trilogy is clearly the weakest. At the center of the story we have an older, more sympathetic Michael Corleone - now a respectable, rich businessman and philanthropist who is trying to reunite his family and make amends - but his mafia past keeps reaching out and dragging him back in.

He begins grooming his illegitimate nephew (Andy Garcia) for a leadership role, and this hothead gets a romance going with Michael's daughter (his first cousin - yuk - in a part played by the director's daughter).

A lot of the story involves the Catholic church and Michael's involvement in their finances - this was obviously based on a scandal that took place in the 1980s. Maybe I'm too much of a stickler for realism, but I never understood the financial picture or who was screwing who out of what.

This should have been about the fall of the Corleones if it was to be a real "rise and fall of..." story, but they never really fall. Instead there is a wild series of murders at the end, intercut with an Italian opera taking place on a stage (referring to the similar sequences in the first two movies), but the logic of it was never clear to me.