Beginning as Martin Scorsese's Apocalypse Now, Gangs of New York, at the end of the auteur's thirty-year dream of it, more resembles his Titanic. Buoyed on a tsunami of dark rumors of behind-the-scenes clashes (the line "Please don't make that sound again, Harvey" registering as either a jab or a plea to Miramax head Harvey Weinstein), eleventh-hour cuts, and release delays pushing the film nearly a year from its projected release date, the picture is a booming, period-exact mess: disinteresting, unbalanced, and burdened by the weight of too much ambition blinding an artist to his celluloid offspring's congenital, mortal defects--hubris redefined for the postmodern age. Though sprawling, it reduces to a series of vaguely connected dramatic snippets that largely fail to anchor the film to any specific place (exception being a visually, viscerally arresting stream of coffins unloaded from ships ferrying the dead from the frontlines of the Civil War). It's a malady exacerbated by the fact that the same five or six characters--played, with one stunning exception, as tepid variations on banal--seem to be everywhere in New York at all times.

Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a child sees his father (Liam Neeson) murdered in an 1846 street brawl between Irish gang "The Dead Rabbits" and a nativist uprising led by the terrifying/hilarious Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis, in an already legendary turn). Flash-forward sixteen years as Amsterdam gets off a boat from somewhere, throws his Bible into the waters of the new world, and vows that avenging his father's death is his sole purpose. To that end, Amsterdam befriends furtive Johnny Sirocco (Henry Thomas), beds cutpurse Jenny (Cameron Diaz), and makes his way to the trusted right hand of Bill, who, with his glass eye turned forever to an American eagle and armed with a giant cleaver and belt of throwing knives, rails on about the evils of Abraham Lincoln and the distastefulness of the Irish.

There can be no real complaint about the expense lavished on the production. The sets representing nineteenth century bellum New York are as detailed as they are hollow and showy. With a similar amount of swooping aerial perspective shots of a teeming, filthy landscape on the verge of anarchy as Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Scorsese by his lack of context and odd detachment adroitly comments on the difficulty of crafting an epic that balances the needs of the few with the demands of the circumstance. In attempting to address that gulf, Gangs of New York succumbs to the worst kind of patronizing condescension as Scorsese first inserts a perfunctory love triangle (dismissed offhand by fictional Bill at one point, Scorsese refuses to let go), then relies on the sort of footnoted flashbacks that remind the audience periodically of what's happened and which characters have already been introduced in a different context. A unifying symbol of a blood-stained straight-razor is even cross-referenced to mark the beginning of the film's finale--a narrative crutch more indicative of a first-time director unsure of his ability to compel and cohere (and contemptuous of his audience besides) than a man revered by many as one of our greatest living filmmakers, if not the greatest.

Performances by Day-Lewis and Jim Broadbent as back alley politico Boss Tweed (the cavalcade of ridiculous character and gang names ("Slaughterhousers," anyone?) is less side-splitting than wearisome) demonstrate the sort of eccentricity required to transcend the bombast of the production--they're the only two in the film (save a wasted Brendan Gleeson, perhaps) to understand that Gangs of New York can only really be taken seriously as, ironically, a melodrama. Images of a stage production of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" ending in an actor playing Lincoln being pelted by vegetables hint at the sort of picture this should have been; images of an elephant rampaging through the Draft Riot streets suggest that bread and circus dispenser P.T. Barnum's dictum was mostly correct.

The violence of the picture is extremely uneven. Except for its opening rumble (a shocking failure given Scorsese's gift for screen violence) and its closing rumble (ending in a fountain of blood that's funny given the squeamishness of the build-up), Gangs of New York spends a great deal of time looking away. Though a pig corpse gets a lot of abuse in one of the stupider Oedipal bonding moments in recent memory, in the picture's universe, punches don't bruise, neck wounds don't bleed, and what's meant to be a horrifying disfigurement turns out to be a tiny cherry-coloured scar easily consumed by the shadow of DiCaprio's perfect cheek bones, or handily obscured by his dainty locks. The potential balance provided the film by Irish barber/sheriff Monk (Gleeson), a figure as imposing and dangerous as The Butcher, is squandered with a fecklessness both puzzling and lamentable. Asking petite milquetoast DiCaprio to play the role of foil to Day-Lewis' Method madness is sadly just the most glaring of a multitude of miscalculations.

DiCaprio and Diaz are a ruinous pair: neither can hold their accents, though the strain of trying seems to sap all discernable energy suggesting that the film would have benefited, Prince of Thieves-like, by the decision just to let them speak as they will. They are a vortex at the centre of the film, an unlikable, unbelievable hero and his plot-device wench (thief, whore, mother protector)--an abyss made worse by Thomas' plot-device nebbish (ally, betrayer, martyr). Gangs of New York is three hours of barren harangue that essentially serve as a showcase for Day-Lewis to receive his second acting Oscar. Having frittered away about 140 minutes on teen romance and obscure portentousness, its half-hour finale is so desperately-edited that it almost satirizes the rest of the film--subtitles announcing locations affected by the Draft Riots (and wouldn't Bill be on the frontlines of such an event rather than ignorant of it utterly?) function mainly as a reminder that we've just spent a long, long time not having the first clue where anything is by itself much less in relation to any other place.

With myriad questions unanswered (unasked, even) and an impressive set impotently waiting for something interesting to unfold upon it, Gangs of New York is a major disappointment. Day-Lewis is either in the wrong film or the film that should have been, his ham-eloquent excellence a perfect evocation of the Scorsese anti-hero (Bickle, Pupkin, LaMotta, Hill) in all its baroque swagger and psychopathic menace. That he stands out sharply from the rest of the production (and that his character's twisted code is ultimately betrayed by the horrible screenplay of co-writer Jay Cocks (script doctor for Cameron's Titanic--physician, heal thyself)) is a sad commentary on just how derailed Scorsese is at the helm of an epic and at this point in his career. Gangs of New York lacks artistry, vision, coherence, and fascination--a familiar yet confusing yarn that feels for all the world like a runaway train, its conductor's last recourse faith, reputation, bullying, and the hope that his next collaboration with Leo and Harvey, a biopic of Howard Hughes (!), can pull him out of his tailspin.-Walter Chaw, originally published December 20, 2002

Miramax used to lard up its transfers with edge-enhancement, so much so that even CRT owners took notice, and because most of these were mastered in HiDef to "future-proof" them, they're getting heedlessly recycled for Blu-ray. If Gangs of New York is growing on me, it's no thanks to this 2.35:1, 1080p presentation, which looks about as good as an upconversion of the 2003 DVD. Close-ups--especially extreme close-ups--fare better than wide shots, which ring and halo with an ironically detail-obscuring sharpness that also creates the odd motion trail in low-lit scenes. The source print itself is intermittently flecked with dirt and has been largely filtered of grain. Don't get me wrong, it's not unwatchable, but the only tangible improvements on offer are in the area of colour reproduction. Meanwhile, the 5.1 audio, at least in its Dolby Digital incarnation (an attendant 24-bit PCM configuration is inaccessible by yours truly), is virtually indistinguishable from the DVD's DTS track, a good-bad proposition: this continues to be the flashiest mix a Scorsese film has ever enjoyed, with the prologue containing one of my all-time favourite subwoofer effects as Brendan Gleeson's Monk kicks open a door; but the many skirmishes overtax the forward soundstage and become almost painfully shrill.

All of the pre-existing supplementary material resurfaces here (in non-anamorphic standard def), starting with an immanently-listenable feature-length yakker from loquacious Scorsese, who cites influences ranging from My Darling Clementine to Fellini's Satyricon, never once sounding particularly self-aggrandizing in the process. Without a doubt the most fruitful tangents are the windows into his collaborations with Daniel Day-Lewis and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who apparently edits without foreknowledge of the script, basing her decisions on an ongoing dialogue with Scorsese. We learn, too, that Day-Lewis' great interjection "Whoopsie-daisy!" was an improv and that Malcolm McDowell was an early contender for the role of Bill the Butcher. Also interesting to hear that Robert De Niro vouched for Leonardo DiCaprio circa This Boy's Life, effectively naming his own successor in the Scorsese stock company. (Harvey Weinstein, alas, remains a more or less unacknowledged elephant in the room. Quite literally in his case.) Video-based extras include "History of the Five Points" (14 mins.), a companion piece to/abridgment of the accompanying Discovery Channel doc "Uncovering the Real Gangs of New York" (36 mins.) in that both prominently feature the film's historical advisor Luc Sante--a straight shooter who blames our general ignorance of New York's unsavoury past on "America's historical amnesia" and "civic protectionism"--and focus on contrasting fact and fiction. There was a real Hellcat Maggie, for instance--she wore brass fingernails and kept a jar of ears on the bar that she tended. And you thought the film was over the top.

"Set Design" (9 mins.) and "Exploring the Sets of Gangs of New York" (22 mins.) are similarly two halves of a whole. In the former, veteran production designer Dante Feretti shows off an intricate model of the sets that would do Doc Brown proud while in the latter he and a visibly fatigued, emotional Scorsese take a walking tour of the exteriors and, moreover, the interiors of those same sets as erected on the backlot of Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Astonishing doesn't begin to describe the scope and detail of these buildings--there's no doubting stunt coordinator Vic Armstrong's claim that they treated them as practical locations, since they were clearly much more than mere façades. For what it's worth, Scorsese's casual lament that Gangs of New York will probably be the last production of its scale in the CGI era casts a melancholy pall over the two pieces that's not easy to shake. Lastly, "Costume Design" (8 mins.) finds Sandy Powell rationalizing her choice to "heighten" certain fashions of the day, though it's Cameron Diaz, of all people, who shares the best insight into the borderline-psychedelic costumes, echoing recent sentiments from India-born director Tarsem in saying that "the one thing [poor communities] have is colour." The music video for U2's "The Hands That Built America" plus teaser (2.35:1) and theatrical (1.85:1) trailers round out the special features. HD previews for Smart People and Step Up 2: The Streets cue up on startup along with reels promoting the Blu-ray format and Miramax's venture into same. Let's hope the just-announced Kill Bill, Vol. 1 gets a fresh pass through the telecine before making its BD debut in the fall.-Bill Chambers

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