Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights.Jennifer Rose Clasen/Warner Bros. Pictures
- The Alto Knights
- Directed by Barry Levinson
- Written by Nicholas Pileggi
- Starring Robert De Niro, Michael Rispoli and Robert De Niro (again)
- Classification 14A; 123 minutes
- Opens in theatres March 21
A grey-market knock-off of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman – with more than a few sprinklings of other entries in the Scorsese canon – the new mafioso drama The Alto Knights arrives in theatres like a week-old slice of gabagool.
This cold-cut stench is all the more disappointing given the ostensibly impressive credentials on offer. The screenplay hails from journalist Nicholas Pileggi, the famed chronicler of American crime who co-wrote both Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino. The movie stars no less a mafia-cinema icon than Robert De Niro, who in a dual role plays two real-life New York gangsters, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. And veteran director Barry Levinson is no slouch himself, having spent the past five decades making everything from beloved dramas (Diner, Rain Main) to a solid gangland movie (Bugsy) to better-than-average De Niro flicks (Sleepers, Wag the Dog).
And yet, the trio’s collaboration on The Alto Knights doesn’t so much cement their crime-drama bona fides as it confirms Scorsese’s unparalleled mastery over the genre. His absence is profoundly, almost absurdly felt as The Alto Knights plods along in its quest to Xerox the mob-movie playbook.
Mostly set in the 1950s, but frequently flashing back several decades via a ridiculously heavy reliance on archival black-and-white photographs (both real and staged), The Alto Knights traces the tensions between two competing Italian-American mob bosses: the tough-talking and impulsive Genovese and the more stable and socially respectable Costello. (The latter character is not to be confused with the “Frank Costello” played by Jack Nicholson in Scorsese’s The Departed, who was based on Boston gangster James Whitey Bulger, who was more accurately depicted by Johnny Depp in Black Mass – listen, mafia hierarchies are confusing enough in real life, let alone in the movies).
For some reason that might have sounded great on paper but utterly fails to impress on-screen, De Niro plays both Genovese and Costello, acting against himself for much of the film’s runtime. While Levinson and his team apply some very mild prosthetics to De Niro for his role as Genovese – making the star’s face just a little tighter, his nose just a little rounder – there is practically no difference between the two characters’ appearances, leaving audiences to incorrectly assume that the men must be twin brothers, or at least closely related cousins. No such dice, though – it’s simply a weirdly conceived trick, executed sloppily. De Niro’s performances only add to the confusion – the actor gives Genovese just a little more hot-head fire in the Joe Pesci vein, but mostly he’s playing the two men as one side of the same coin.
The mumbly, stumbly dialogue – no matter which character is speaking – also seems cribbed entirely from De Niro’s legendary performance as Jimmy “the Gent” Conway in Goodfellas. There are entire minutes-long stretches in which the actor simply repeats variations of, “What are you talkin’ about? What? What is that? What do you mean?” over and over again. A good deal of everyone’s valuable time could have been saved had Pileggi simply inserted a few well-placed “yadda yaddas.”
Not that the rest of the cast fares much better with the material, even if Levinson stacks his ensemble with a cell block’s worth of familiar underworld faces: a few Sopranos alums here (Michael Rispoli, Matt Servitto, Louis Mustillo), a Scorsese collaborator there (James Ciccone), and at least one performer whose C.V. includes both such worlds (that’d be Katharine Narducci, who played Charmaine Bucco on the HBO series, and the wife of Pesci’s character in The Irishman).
Reportedly in development for decades and initially carrying the title Wise Guys, Pileggi’s script might have felt fresh had it initially been made back in the ‘70s, before so many other gangster movies – including Pileggi’s own – made the moviegoing public overly familiar with such infamous incidents as the Apalachin Mafia summit of 1957 or the barbershop assassination of Albert Anastia that same year. Instead, every single beat of The Alto Knights feels like an historical footnote from Goodfellas or The Godfather Part II stretched out to interminable feature length – musty, dusty, dry. This new-old racket? It’s pretty fuggedable.
