Gangster Squad Review

9th Jan 2013

Mob boss Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) rules LA through the judicious application of murder, bribery and general fightiness. War hero and LA cop John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) doesn’t much like this. So, with a secret squad of honest officers sanctioned by their chief, he will take Cohen down using any means necessary.

Gangster Squad’s horrible trailers, all raucous ego, were very off-putting and deducted several points from my sliding scale of enthusiasm for the film. Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer’s involvement, on the other hand, added several points to the opposite effect (though itself tempered with the not-so-good post-Zombieland 30 Minutes or Less). Throw in Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, and End of Watch’s Michael Peña, plus my own personal quirky favourite for no good reason, Giovanni Ribisi, and the scale was still finishing up on the positive end of the scale.

Despite what the opening credits say, don’t expect anything close to a true story. Equally, don’t expect the shadowy Hollywood of LA Confidential, this is more Dick Tracy. It is not a subtle film. Saturated in colour and finished in high shine, the film is a glossy, violent comic-book fantasy.

The story itself is an established one. The details may be slightly different, but it’s still one we all know pretty well. The characters are, in general, a tad underfed, but not totally at the expense of the entertainment. Entertainment obviously reigns as the main force for Fleischer. Un-willing to be swamped by moral questions beyond a vague, superficial level, the aim of the game is very much goodies and baddies, pseudo-Matrix shoot-outs, car chases, bloody deaths: all the good stuff. While the film can’t be called light-hearted, it is also not a serious discussion on who watches the watchmen or those who do battle with monsters taking care not to become one. In some ways the film takes its lead from O’Mara’s black and white view of the world. Cohen is evil and needs to be removed. Simple.

Penn’s Cohen bears more than a passing resemblance to the villains from Dick Tracy, due only in part to the prosthetic nose. Hamming it up in grand style, Penn must surely have had fun making this. Spiteful and violent, given to grandiose statements about fate and destiny, his Cohen is a gross little man with big designs on the world. At the other extreme Brolin’s soldier/cop O’Mara is as dour and dull as Cohen is showy. Why is it so hard to have a fun hero? Although not quite up to Zombieland’s standard of whip-quick banter, there is still a fair smattering of laugh-out-loud chat from the squad.

With its starry ensemble cast, it is no real surprise that Gosling – currently surfing his own personal fame wave – as the initially reluctant Jerry Wooters is centred on at the expense of his squad mates. But he copes with it well, so it’s no real problem. True, the rest of the cast is given very little in the way of motivation except superficial snap decisions. Anthony Mackie’s Coleman Harris needs to defend his neighbourhood. Peña’s Navidad Ramirez follows his mentor, Robert Patrick’s cowboy sharpshooter, wherever he goes. Ribisi’s Conway Keeler wants his son to have a better future. The team have been selected from a library of stock Noir-ish characters, really only there for some interesting background. Nick Nolte’s police chief is a grizzled old turkey, seemingly stuffed so full of whisky and food that even a morsel, be it only wafer thin, would send him into paroxysms of vomiting. Stone’s beautiful mob-girl is given the very barest whisper of any kind of story aside from her dangerous affair with Wooters.

The over-arching story is set in stone by history and its cinematic predecessors; Fleischer wraps the whole familiar tale in his own stylised banner, and it works. After all, it’s not the destination, but the high-speed chase in shiny 50s muscle cars to get there that matters.