Slick to a fault, Fleischer is from the “every hair perfectly placed” school of technique nothing feels vital or consequential in Gangster Squad. Sean Penn and Holt McCallany in “Gangster Squad.” Photo by Wilson Webb – © 2013 Warner Bros. Unseasoned writer Will Beall’s leaden purple prose reduces the events of Paul Liebman’s pulpy true crime book to embarrassingly po-faced exchanges between uncomfortable actors trying to appropriate the innate coolness and sensuality of Bogart, Cagney, Bacall, or Davis but with none of the witty acknowledgment of their audience those actors perfected. Jerry Wooters (Gosling) – recklessly romancing Cohen’s moll (Stone) and out for vengeance after the plucky shoeshine boy he has befriended gets shot down by Cohen’s men.īuried under three layers of tan putty, Penn overplays with a vengeance – coiled and barking, he may be the only actor who understands how the final product was going to play – his outburst scenes and gruesome murders of foes and compatriots alike play like cut scenes from a videogame in their lack of variation and insistence on expository dialogue. John O’Mara (Brolin) rounds up his posse including an aging Wild West crack-shot (Robert Patrick), an African American knife-thrower (Anthony Mackie), a token Latino (Michael Pena, a waste after his brilliant performance in last year’s End of Watch), wire-tapping futurist Officer Conway Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi) and the soulfully sensitive Sgt. With the aid of his much smarter wife, Sgt. Gangster Squad has its share of casting coups in the red-hot Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, square-jawed bore Josh Brolin, and Sean Penn doing a Dick Tracy cartoon version of gangland kingpin Mickey Cohen, but Fleischer’s giddy, over-stylized vision remains purely superficial, quickly forgotten when the smoke clears from the considerable gunplay.ĭubiously “inspired by true events” this slapdash effort takes the macho mission shoot-‘em-up approach of something like The Expendables rather than a classy effort like Brian De Palma’s all-time classic The Untouchables in giving us the broad strokes of a group of nail-tough beat cops recruited by LAPD chief Parker (Nick Nolte drawling his way through another performance as if chewing on beef jerky) as under-the-law tactical agents to disrupt Cohen’s criminal empire. While the former film was a mostly successful zom-com with a rushed ending, the latter was a tediously unfunny rob-com about bumbling criminals making little use of a fine cast including Danny McBride and Jesse Eisenberg. Confidential or Michael Mann’s intimate Public Enemies due to a battery of corny, faux-noir line readings and the bludgeoning candy-gore sensibility of Zombieland and 30 Minutes or Less director Ruben Fleischer.
While certainly loud, somewhat sexy, and decked out in all the accurate aesthetic trappings of 1930s Los Angeles, Gangster Squad turns out to be merely a dim cousin to sincere works like L.A.
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