Looks great but ultimately disappointing.

Rating: 6/10 (3 March 2003)

On the plus side: Daniel Day Lewis is amazing as Bill the Butcher; DiCaprio is better than expected as Amsterdam; Jim Broadbent and Brendan Gleeson are also outstanding. The look of the film is great, and the fight scenes that punctuate the film gruesome and exciting.
On the downside: The story was slow and clunking and it's a shame that Weinstein couldn't persuade Scorsese to trim the film more. The exposition is heavy handed. For example we really didn't need to see any of the flashbacks and there are some scenes where DiCaprio, in particular, either in character or in the voice over, feels it necessary to explain bits of the film's history. The screenwriters have obviously researched in depth (or got it out of Astbury's source book) but then kept all the research in the film even when it didn't necessarily move the story along. The symbolism was also heavy handed. That scenes with Priest Vallon's razor. All of that could have been cut. John Reilly's character and accent were poor. Finally, there was no point to Diaz's character and, besides, she was wrong for the part. One suspects that she was foisted on Scorsese to increase box office and because there was a need to have a major female character in the story. I can't help thinking that the material would have been better served by a writer like Nicholas Pileggi and a more episodic approach as in Scorsese's and Pileggi's Goodfellas and Casino.
For what it's worth, the person I went to see it with disagrees totally with all my negative points, and it was interesting enough for me to want to read the book.