Violent, incoherent & very long; typical Scorsese

Rating: Null/10 (25 March 2006)

There's this director called Martin Scorsese, okay, he's really good with camera placement - his movies always look hip & trendy - plus he's a not untalented director of actors. He usea lots of pop music & his movies are usually full of the kind of excessively bloody violence & profanity strewn dialogue that delights the teen crowd. This combination has so far proved persuasive enough to elevate him into the Top 10 lists of 'The World's Greatest Directors' courtesy of hip, trendy mags like Empire. Fair enough. Unfortunately what this acclaimed director cannot do is deliver a coherent, well told story about characters we actually take to heart. Case in point - Gangs of New York, aka another example of Scorsese's shockingly inept storytelling.
Seriously, what is the story in GoNY about? The film is thematically incoherent & badly structured. It wanders from an initial revenge set up between DiCaprio's Dad and Day-Lewis's baddie to scenes involving immigration, the draft, local politics, racism and corruption. Some of this is sporadically interesting but none of it coheres into anything meaningful so that when the end finally arrives the viewer is left with a 'Huh, is that it?' feeling (and it must be conceded that a similar sense of frustration attends the ending of almost every other movie from this overrated director).
Even the performances are dreadful. Leonardo DiCaprio is simply miscast in a heroic role for which he does not possess the required presence. Whenever this guy is on screen you can feel your eyes sliding away in the direction of whatever else is going on in the frame. As Bill the Butcher, Day-Lewis blows DiCaprio off the screen & yet he's the villain! Word of advice, Marty: when you're trying to make an audience empathise with your protagonist's near three hour quest for revenge it's really not a good idea to make your villain approx 100 times more charismatic & interesting than your hero.
Okay, let's cut the crap. Gangs of New York is a mess & its heavy handed marketing by Miramax, which secured it 11 Academy Award nominations, received swift and well deserved justice when it won precisely ... none.