Quality gets MPD

Rating: 6/10 (2 December 2007)

Gangs of New York suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder in terms of its quality. We have, on the one hand, the masterful talent of Martin Scorcese, Daniel Day-Lewis and (though he is drastically underused here) Liam Neeson, a setting in the dynamic and brilliantly reconstructed New York City of the mid-nineteenth century, the themes of Civil War Draft Riots and a rapidly expanding and industrializing country attempting to cope with sudden and massive expansion and waves of European immigration. For anyone who has lived in the northeast and whose forefathers crossed through Ellis Island, there is nothing more we could ask for.
Unfortunately, we also have the sometimes talented but dreadfully miscast Leonardo DiCaprio aping an awful Irish accent across a horrifically made up Cameron Diaz (whose accent is equally awful). In spite of the great visual recreations, the film tacitly ignores some important historical points, and not merely by bending dates and character traits: the idea that Irish or other poor European immigrants would have associated with Chinese (almost non-existent in the Manhattan of the day) or blacks is downright laughable. The great climactic action scene is rather dry, nuanced, and thoughtlessly executed. In fact, the film's action takes place only at a few checkpoints throughout, and meantime we are forced to sit through two and a half hours of incomprehensible intrigue and completely unsympathetic characters.
And yet, to add further confusion, we are told that internal disputes had forced Scorcese to make "damaging" cuts to the release version of this film, and that fans have been clamoring for him to release an even more painfully dragged-out director's cut (a request which he has firmly resisted). So in the end, Gangs of New York is a very pretty and awful mess, much like the actual city of New York must have been in the 1860's. Scorcese's nostalgia for the old New York City is one I fully sympathize with, but this nostalgia hardly suffices to cement a solid film.