*/****
starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn
screenplay by Will Beall
directed by Ruben Fleischer
by Angelo Muredda In his recent chat
with David Poland, Ruben Fleischer bristled at the suggestion that Gangster
Squad shares any DNA with Warren Beatty's Dick
Tracy. That's the sort of aesthetic family
resemblance a lightweight like Fleischer ought to milk for all it's worth, but
hear him out: Sean Penn's enterprising mob boss Mickey Cohen, he insists, isn't
a cartoon bruiser in the tradition of Al Pacino's Big Boy Caprice, but a real
guy whose face only looks a little off because it's been molded by other men's
fists. He isn't a comic strip-grotesque, then, but a seasoned
boxer-turned-kingpin reanimated by a grand old actor and his team of
historically-faithful makeup artists. What more could one ask of a Warner Bros.
crime movie than such attention to detail? A lot, apparently–especially if the
finished product looks more like Elmer Fudd than any retired amateur boxer.
Verisimilitude is a nice goal, but it doesn't suit Gangster Squad, at once a lumbering history lesson and a squib of a
gangster picture–a zit on the ass of Mulholland Falls, Lee Tamahori's somehow more accomplished stab at
L.A. noir.
Fleischer's hackneyed seriousness finds a
curious match in former homicide investigator Will Beall's bloviating
screenplay. While the souped-up trailers and kitschy title promise harmless
exploitation fun (forever deferred by the haunting absence of a theatre-set
shootout nixed in the wake of last summer's Aurora massacre), Beall fancies
this a ground-level history of Los Angeles, surely born of his coyness about
cribbing from The
Untouchables in every respect but the setting. Cohen, we're
told in beat cop Josh Brolin's stilted opening voiceover, rose up through his
humble New York origins and bought his way to the top of L.A. through his "will
to power." A characteristically grizzled Nick Nolte (star of the
aforementioned Mulholland Falls), playing the last American police chief
untouched by mob influence, goes even farther with this clumsy period
sign-posting in the big speech that provides our flimsy narrative clothesline.
His instructions to form the titular squad of bad-news cops in order to root
out this "Eastern crook" and end a war for the city's soul already
fought against the threat of "Indians and Mexicans" is yet another
lesson, more halting than the first. Tempting as it is to grant Beall
points for his basic fluency in Nietzsche and postwar ethnic shoptalk, these
are the buzzwords of a self-enchanted screenwriter doing Local History writ
large and tripping over basic exposition in the process.
You'd think that Beal's showboating would be in
the wheelhouse of the director of the nauseatingly hyper-stylized Zombieland, but Fleischer seems not to have figured out his
approach to what we might call The Dick Tracy Question. Too earnest to ironically indulge in the
narrative's familiar pulpy beats and too uncertain about the strength of this
material to play it straight, Fleischer aims for a muddled middle, jazzing up
Beall's faux-hardboiled dialogue with slow-motion shootouts and shaky HD-cam
pursuits that only remind us of how much better Public Enemies turned out. Miami Vice and Nine DP Dion Beebe can't decide if he's going for Michael
Mann's minimalism or Rob Marshall's period bloat this time, and the result,
strangely enough, is derivative of nothing so much as Cool World.
Although there's no discernible signature in
Fleischer's work to date outside this sticky-fingered borrowing from more
accomplished filmmakers, you can usually count on him to make decent use of his
cast. Not so here. As the squad's most tender-hearted member, someone who only comes
aboard when a shoeshine kid with a target on his back meets his fate at Cohen's
hands, Ryan Gosling, too, seems on loan from better movies. He's a husk of his
already-underwritten Crazy, Stupid, Love. character, his tentative romance with that film's co-star
Emma Stone (dressed like Jessica Rabbit) impossible to invest in or even follow
unless it's read as a continuation of that courtship in an alternate timeline.
They're more listless this time out, but then, just look at what's around them.
