The Alto Knights

After mob boss Vito (Robert De Niro with loads of facial prosthetics) gets into a scrape with the authorities, he has to flee the USA and leave his childhood friend and business partner Frank (Robert De Niro without augmentation) in charge of things. Many years go by and the latter makes a success of the post prohibition business, avoiding the narcotics industry and keeping the peace amongst the other families that control the boroughs of New York. Then Vito decides he wants to come home and resume his position at the top of the tree, but being quite a loose cannon finds that Frank and just about everyone else isn’t so keen on that proposal. True to form, Vito decides to make his presence felt and things start to become pretty precarious for Frank. That only gets more serious when the Feds and the US Senate decide to conduct a crackdown on the burgeoning drugs trade that Vito is seeing as a future way to make millions of dollars. In the end, Frank is going to have to make some tough decisions. Now, aside from the skills of the make-up artists who have managed to make one De Niro look authentic and the other like someone from a Jim Henson movie, the rest of this is a pretty poorly paced and shallow gangster movie with a great deal of chatting and virtually no action aside from the opening scene and a very messy haircut later on. His solution is, historically, quite quirky but the rest of this is procedural and I thought really rather dull as it bounces us around the timelines of their lives, loves and fairly ruthless business tactics before rushing us through who did what to whom as the story rather fizzles out. It’s all a pretty weak style over substance exercise that sees it’s lacklustre star woodenly going through the motions leading a supporting cast that adds very little to the whole thing as it lumbers along stylishly, but unremarkably. Nobody’s finest work, sorry.

'The Alto Knights' delivered for me. A (biographical) crime drama featuring Robert De Niro, what's not to love? It's a bio about Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, two people I'm not all that familiar with but the story is an easy one to understand and follow so it matters not. I'm not absolutely sold on the documentary-esque scenes, though everything more traditional is excellent in my opinion. It doesn't feel like it adds anything new to the genre, much of it does feel derivative, but I'm not even hating at all because I highly enjoyed it. De Niro is as quality as one would expect in this sorta role, or roles as it is. I didn't initially know it was a dual, so I was actually quizzing myself as to if it was him playing both; I was like, it sounds like him but the make-up is good enough that I'm not convinced to be honest. Only me, I'm sure.

You guys remember how bad Gotti was? Well this is what happens when someone tries to out-do De Niro in anything. He took a breath, told Travolta to hold his beer, and sat down and showed him how bad a mob movie can really be. Part of it is, well it's De Niro's politics. He isn't just outspoken politically, he's an outspoken cry-bully and that who cry baby attitude makes it pretty unbelievable when you're playing a mobster. And part of it goes a little deeper, The Good Shepard was his last decent flick and Matt Damon had to carry him through it. So now we get De Niro playing two roles that he never should have been cast in to begin with. We have a good script that no one can seem to sell. One that was probably written by the most expensive AI on the market, as testament by it's overwhelming cliches and predictable plot twists. It's amateur hour here, but, hey, at least Gotti is good by comparison.

"The Alto Knights" is a highly recommended and worthwhile film and the most surprising thing of all is how bloodless the finale is. This is a good thing since it allows the film to be rounded off in the most unorthodox way imaginable. However, even though there is plenty said about notorious New York crime bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese as young men very little of these early years is actually shown and the film really should have been made in the style of Francis Ford Coppola's magnificent "The Godfather" (1972), "The Godfather Part II" (1974) or Sergio Leone's marvellous "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984) amongst many other outstanding examples of this genre at its finest. It is always more satisfying when we make the journey with the characters as it provides considerable depth and a greater understanding of the people involved - this is certainly the case here with the power struggle and underlying sense of betrayal between Frank and Vido which would be more focused and have a greater sense of critical urgency as a result - and in doing so the film might also be less apt to join the long line of pale imitations inspired by Martin Scorsese's superb "Goodfellas" (1990).