GANGSTER SQUAD

Stars: Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick, Sullivan Stapleton and Nick Nolte.
Writer: Will Beall; based upon the book by Paul Lieberman.
Director Ruben Fleischer

Rating: 1.5/5

‘Inspired by…’ morphs into ‘Ripped off from…’ with barely 15 minutes gone in Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad, a work that so clearly riffs on plot beats and key characters from 1987s The Untouchables, one is tempted to scan the credits for acknowledgement of Brian De Palma and David Mamet. Their names aren’t there, which proves to be just two of the missing creative elements that made the Kevin Costner/Sean Connery classic so good and this B-movie claptrap so bad.

Based on a true story circa 1949 but so gussied up in modern-day film techniques as to ring patently false, Gangster Squad tells the story of rough’n’tough good cop John O’Mara (Josh Brolin, one-note), the man charged with heading up a secret squad of under-the-radar lawmen whose job it is to take down ambitious East Coast gangster Mickey Cohen (a twitchy Sean Penn, hamming it up and reminding us how good De Niro’s Al Capone was) before he establishes control out West. The misfit heroes include the smart guy (Giovanni Ribisi, in the Charles Martin Smith role) and the wise old-timer (Robert Patrick, as the crotchety Connery archetype). Because it is LA and not Chicago, Andy Garcia’s Italian-American rookie is replaced by Anthony Mackie’s stoic African-American and Michael Pena’s Mexican upstart.

The only characters not direct throwbacks to The Untouchables are those of smooth-talking playboy cop Jerry Wooters and Cohen’s linguist and main squeeze Grace Faraday. These parts are played, respectively, by Hollywood’s hottest young stars, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, though neither exhibits much interest in anything other than cheap mugging and come-hither glances to convey whatever meagre nuance their parts require. The one support player who can hold his head high is Australian import Sullivan Stapleton (Animal Kingdom), whose act of heroism in the face of Cohen and his hoods is the one thing that rings true in the film.

The film opens with some terrible violence (not a little girl’s death in a corner store explosion, but just as shocking); there is some perfunctory machismo involving a wannabe tough-guy who works for Cohen, all of which goes nowhere. From that point, the carbon-copying of hits top gear – gathering the members of the unit; a raid that goes wrong; a high-profile momentum that leads to street-level retribution.

‘Homage’ is all well and good, but when minor details are mirrored it becomes too much to bear. De Niro’s legendary rant “I want him dead! I want his family dead! I want his house burnt to the ground!” is, quite unbelievably, reproduced by a shrieking Penn, who spits and bellows, “I want them all dead! I want their families dead! I want their pets dead!” Worst of all, Fleischer tries to match De Palma’s train station steps gun battle, a sequence that brought all of the director’s technical skill to the fore, with a tinny hotel lobby slo-mo shoot-‘em-up in which tommy-gun bullets are sprayed every which way yet only seem to hit the buffet table.

What Fleischer and his team didn’t copy but really should have was the artistry on display in every frame of De Palma’s film. There is no rich Ennio Morricone score (instead, we get the man responsible for the Transformers soundtrack); no shadowy, lush Stephen Burum cinematography (this gaudy digi-mess is the work of Oscar-winner, Dion Beebe);and, there is none of Marilyn Vance’s attention to period costuming (Mary Zophres new/old fashion hybrid is jarring).

Ultimately, Gangster Squad doesn’t even try to hide the fact it is a cheap knock-off. The Untouchables grows in stature with each passing year; Fleischer’s hack-job, which some wags have already labelled ‘The Unwatchables’, will be forgotten in an instance.