Overly Long And Often Tedious, But Tries To Make A Point

Rating: 4/10 (21 December 2002)

Overall I would have to rate this movie as a disappointment. It's extremely violent and chaotic; thoroughly unlikeable for the most part, with a series of characters who don't really seem to have many redeeming qualities. At almost three hours, it's extremely long (particularly for a movie that didn't really seem to have much of a point until the last few minutes.) Sure, there were issues - ethnic rivalries, political corruption, family vengeance - but it just didn't seem to be going anywhere. Performances were OK, but no one particularly caught my eye with an outstanding performance. Cameron Diaz (as Jenny) was woefully underused, and Leonardo DiCaprio (as Amsterdam) has yet to prove (in my opinion anyway) that his wonderful performance in "Titanic" was anything more than a fluke. The best performance in the movie was probably Daniel Day-Lewis's turn as "the Butcher." Having said all that, the last few minutes of the movie did help bring things together and established (in my view) a purpose for the movie, and certainly left me and others who I heard commenting on it with a haunting image.
**SPOILER AHEAD**
Nothing much had been making sense, until the last few scenes, which were really nothing more than a series of shots of the New York skyline at various points in history. The last shot, of course, was a haunting image of the Twin Towers, which helped me make sense of the movie. It's a classic "the more things change, the more they stay the same" message. New York in the 1860's: ethnic rivalries, suspicion of immigrants and violence, all with the spectre of war (the Civil War, and the New York City draft riots) hanging behind. Sound familiar? This is how it strikes me anyway, and it struck me enough to raise my estimation of the movie's value. I still didn't care for it. For the most part I found it a rather dull and uninteresting three hours, but Martin Scorsese did get my attention at the end with that Twin Towers shot and he did get me thinking about the movie. When you leave a movie that you really didn't care for still thinking about it - well, that has to be a success of some sorts.
4/10 (about 2 points higher than I was going to rate it before I actually thought about it.)