Advertising won't trick me

Rating: 2/10 (22 January 2003)

I don't care who directed it, this movie sucked. The acting is terrible, the characters aren't beleivable at all, the storylines and main points of this movie aren't imaginative, their just stupid and ridiculous, in fact the only good part in this movie is the actual historical facts (which have nothing to do with the storyline, and aren't exactely diffacult to do whatever you want with seeing as it was a friggen riot). First on the acting, De Caprio still is just as bad as he was in Titanic, unbeleivable, inconvincing and overall, he doesn't come off as 'badass' he comes of as just being an paumpus ass. He's supposed to be Irish but he continualy slips in and out of accent. Cameron Diaz should stay in the stupid pop-culture movies because her 'blonde cheerleader' acting style obviously is way out of place in this movie set in the 1860's. And Lewis as 'Bill the Butcher' just comes off as a jerk, not as the leader of the 'Native American' party during the war (which are badly represented since although they were politically active group, they were not a common street gang, which makes sense since they hated both the Irish and the blacks, why would they have to hang around in the slums?). Now for the story, it starts off somewhat interesting with the battle between obviously persecuted Irish and some other unknown group (which since you don't know they're the 'Native' party yet, makes the fact ok). But in this scene, the main character Amsterdam is an 8 year old, and not Leo. But then the time warp happens and it's 16 years later, enter Leo. The storylines don't display the chaotic and desperate struggle between natives of New York, Irish immigrants from the potato famine and freshly freed slaves, struggling for jobs, food and houses. Where there was scuffles and fights, they were random and not organized, gangs were small and primarily nothing more than names of small groups of teens, rather than the personality and colorful differences in the movie. Lastly, this movie shows an organized slum of gangs who meet at conferences to plan fights, this is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. And to top it all of, for about 30 minutes this is a friggen porno, bubes, sex and whores which is obviously there to distract from the fact that there are 10 second pauses in between each line! With all these lovely little elements put into place, what the hell to all these people and critics who say this is so good and Oscar calibur, see in this crapfest of a movie?