I am trying to think of the last time I saw a new Mafia movie that was really great. Probably The Many Saints of Newark. I am not a fan of The Irishman, and I hated Gotti. The Irishman was flat. Gotti was edited by someone who seemed drunk.
I wanted to like The Irishman because it was Scorsese, but it felt like a retread of every old trope from every Mafia movie out there. Gotti was such a mess I couldn’t get through it, but I wanted to, because I like Travolta.
I did not think the gimmick of De Niro playing two parts was going to be the most interesting thing here, but the movie never really landed punches. I don’t like violence for the sake of it — it has to be earned, and it has to make narrative sense … even in a movie about men whose lives are drenched in violence. This was a flat landscape though. And the gimmick made no sense — it loaned nothing to the movie in terms of energy, and it didn’t seem Deniro or Levinson were playing with it much in terms of having some symbolic significance in the movie, so the whole point was lost on me.
A Mafia movie shouldn’t be on in the background and not disturbing you at all. The Offer had me burning through it, and not just because the movie making process was interesting — Giovani Ribisi was a livewire on the screen. Honestly, if there is nothing you have to add to the genre, then why bother?