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Though it's stylish and features a talented cast, Gangster Squad suffers from lackluster writing, underdeveloped characters, and an excessive amount of violence. Read critic reviews
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Movie Info
Ruthless, Brooklyn-born mobster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) has 1949 Los Angeles in an iron fist, as he accumulates a fortune from drugs, prostitution and gambling. Cohen has an army of paid goons at his disposal, but he also has certain policemen and politicians in his pocket. It's enough to intimidate even the bravest cop, until Los Angeles Police Department mavericks, Sgts. John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) and Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), form a secret crew to bring Cohen to justice.
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Rating: R (Strong Violence|Language)
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Genre: Crime, Drama, Action
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Original Language: English
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Director: Ruben Fleischer
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Producer: Dan Lin, Kevin McCormick, Michael Tadross
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Writer: Will Beall
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Release Date (Theaters): wide
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Release Date (Streaming):
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Box Office (Gross USA): $46.0M
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Runtime:
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Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
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Production Co: Lin Pictures, Kevin McCormick
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Sound Mix: Datasat, SDDS, Dolby Digital
Cast & Crew
News & Interviews for Gangster Squad
Critic Reviews for Gangster Squad
Audience Reviews for Gangster Squad
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ryan gosling surrounded by lots of explosions.
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This film just confirmed for me not to always listen to Rotten Tomato's reviews. The reviewers seem to feed off each other lately and not make reviews for themselves. This was a really entertaining film. It had a really good cast and a simple script. The level of violence is not for everyone, but the characters were great.
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I loved this based-on-a-true story American good vs. evil saga. Reminiscent of The Untouchables and LA Confidential, this gritty, stylish film is more melodramatic though. This is gripping entertainment, not realism. The all-star cast is great, both the stars and the supporting characters as well. Sean Penn's craggy features and real-life tough guy persona make him perfect for the role as crime boss Mickey Cohen. Josh Brolin is a good foil to Penn's character and a compliment to Ryan Gosling's character. Much like the characters played by Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce in LA Confidential, the are two very different types of cops. Penn's Cohen is better than even most Bond villains in his vision of domination. Emma Stone I is certainly beautiful and a good femme fatale in this movie, torn between love and the gritty reality of the LA underworld. Robert Patrick, Michael Pena, and Haley Strode, among others, offered up memorable contributions. The squad's even multi-racial! I'd like to have seen more of Nick Nolte; he's fantastic in roles like this- see The Tin Red Line, Mulholland Falls, and the 2 48 hours movies. He even spoofs the type in Tropic Thunder. "Los Angeles is my fu*#in destiny roars Sean Penn's Mickey Cohen, and you believe he means it. The destiny of LA is up for grabs in 1949, and no tactic is too brutal for either side to employ in this battle for supremacy. I identify with the cops, the streetwise enforcers from another era, reminiscent of Dirty Harry exclaiming, "I'm all broken up about his rights!" The final shootout is good, but probably not not as memorable as Scarface .That film sets the standard for operatic shootout/death scenes. Recommended for action fans.
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The latest effort from Director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) is the film adaptation of Paul Lieberman's book Gangster Squad (which is in turn somewhat based on actual events during 1940's post-war Los Angeles). For this kind of high-profile Action/Drama, it was good to see Hollywood not be too shy of the blood. Here in Australia we have an MA15+ rating, and that's what it's there for, so go nuts, guys! (I have a whole 'nother issue with film restriction classifications, but let's not go into that right now). I'm a sucker for continuous shots, and though Gangster Squad was hardly in the Children of Men category there, it was nice to see Fleischer chuck a few of them in too. I was glad to see that things were flawed in the plans set out by the film's protagonists. The first cop that leading man, Sergeant O'Mara (played by a man I'm fast becoming fond of; Josh Brolin -Men in Black 3, True Grit, Jonah Hex, W., American Gangster, Planet TerrorNo Country for Old Men, The Dead Girl, Hollow Man, Mimic, Nightwatch) tries to hire, flat out turns him down, and the teams' first operation goes completely tits up in the extreme. It added a good element of realism, that just because these guys are "badass" doesn't mean they're immune to outside influences. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, after all. In the middle there, it's also kind of a feel good movie. I mean, it's "feel good" in the same way that The Dark Knight Rises is "feel good", in that it is, for a brief moment, a little inspiring. It paints this cool picture about doing something bigger than yourself. Maybe that's not "feel good" at all... But it makes you feel something, and that's more than can be said for the majority of swill spilling out of the "Blockbuster" elements in the industry. Nick Nolte (Warrior, Tropic Thunder, Hotel Rwanda, Hulk) as Police Chief Parker was... A surprise. Though admittedly a pleasant one. Whatever your opinion on his personal life, he's still (at nearly 72) a perfectly capable actor at times, and his character was quite possibly my favourite of the film. Emma Stone (Movie 43, Easy A, Zombieland) is also slowly forcing me to like her after this and The Amazing Spider-Man. Holt McCalany (Bullet to the Head, Heroes, Fight Club, Three Kings, Alien 3) as Karl Lennox is honestly great. His character is such a bad-ass, but is shamefully underused, it might be nice one day to see McCallany as something other than a good looking muscle-man, offsiding with little to no lines (his character here is virtually identical to that of his as Wade in The Losers). Despite singing those praises, I didn't exactly love Gangster Squad. It was painfully obvious who was gonna be dying later, as time went on, in many cases it even became perfectly clear exactly when and why they were gonna die, long before it ever happened. A lot of the lines were just as predictable, if not more so. I found myself saying their speeches in my head before they had the time to finish, despite my having approximately zero knowledge of 1949 gang warfare. It reeks of morbid unoriginality. Though I suppose with a screen adaptation of a book based on real-life, there's only so much originality goin' around. It, unfortunately just got more and more predictable as time went on. On gang warfare, I'd think that really "Gangster Squad" should probably have been "Mobster Squad" I mean, after all, that's really what the time period was about. Plus, I almost didn't watch the movie by failings of its title alone, I mean... Come on! "Gangster Squad"? Ugh. Thankfully (or not, depending on how you look at it) the title is terribly misleading. Think in terms of "Drug Squad" rather than "Gangs of New York". Their freeze-frame fight in the middle there was obviously meant to be some grand, dramatic entry, but I honestly found it to be nothing but annoying as fuck. Not to mention the fact that there are some awful camera rushes and the CGI smoke is just of an appalling quality. And I really think we should have reached a point in technology where films that have actual money should really have no excuse for using bad blue-screen. I mean, this is really simple stuff people, you learn that shit in Primary School. And though I'll admit that kicking the shit out of a high ranking cop, in front of other cops, was a good way to portray the power Mickey Cohan had, I still can't get behind the choice of casting him with Sean Penn (All the Kings Men, The Interpreter, 21 Grams, I Am Sam, Carlito's Way), not at all. There are also a hefty goddamn amount of potholes, or points where the plot was dropped all together! No spoilers, but how Cohan ever figured out who was responsible for the events of the film, I'll never know. And when you spend half a film trying to achieve a goal, and then your characters achieve it, shouldn't there be some sort of pay off? Apparently not, in Gangster Squad, it is bad, for, again, absolutely no reason. Though certainly watchable on all accounts, Gangster Squad was hardly something I'll make a habit of recommending. 53 % -Gimly
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