About the only thing I can say in this film's favour is I think I know what Scorsese feels like to people who don't like Scorsese

Rating: 4/10 (8 February 2020)

About the only thing I can say in this film's favour is that after seeing it I think I have a good idea of what Scorsese films feel like to people who hate Scorsese (well, that and that I got a kick out of seeing Don Rickles and Joe Bob Briggs). Good lord this film is wasted potential. It's from one of my favourite directors and it has a great cast (hell even in this mess of a film the performances are pretty good), and the last Scorsese mob film is a contender for my favourite film of all time, and yet, this film was a near-complete waste of time. So what went wrong? Well, really this film suffered a death of a thousand cuts. I'll tell you this, the film certainly did not start out strong with opening credits that went on way too damn long and were quite dull, and on top of that even the music playing over the credits was sub-par. For that matter, I really didn't like a lot of the score/soundtrack for this film (in fact a few times I found the songs used rather distracting), which is saying something because this is a Martin Scorsese film and usually I love the soundtracks in his films, which brings me to this film's use of voice-over narration. As everyone and their mother knows, Martin Scorsese is usually very good at knowing how to use voice-over narration. Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Irishman are all in my opinion films where voice-over is done brilliantly, so it pains me to say this voice-over in this film is terrible. For one thing, it's much too overused. Seriously, I was half an hour in and I think there had been like maybe 5 minutes where there wasn't a narrator talking. It does get better, but it's still overused. For another thing, I just didn't like the voice-over narration. Something about De Niro's voice I think, but I just didn't like it very much. This film gets compared a lot to Goodfellas, and while I can definitely see the basis of the comparison, Goodfellas is the far superior film. For example, while both films are rise-and-fall stories, Goodfellas does that job a lot better, whereas here I was left saying "not much of a rise in this rise-and-fall story is there", and even the fall was rather lacklustre. More than anything though, this film just really wasn't very interesting. It was extremely dull and I had to resist the urge to turn the damn thing off the entire time. What I liked about this film I didn't like that much, and what I disliked really really bothered me.