Disappointing

Rating: 7/10 (5 January 2003)

The talent and money available should have resulted in one of the great flicks of all time. But instead the film is a jerky, often difficult to understand parody of a time in America's history that while certainly more violent than one can imagine could not have been so cartoonlike and so full of frankly bizarre and corrupt characters. The violent scenes were nothing special and actually for all their brutality failed to convey the violence. Compare truly believable violent scenes from Saving Private Ryan; Braveheart, Gladiator, Pulp Fiction, etc. and Scorcese did nothing special with these scenes. There was so much potential for a visually stunning film- but even this opporunity was wasted until the closing. We see hardly nothing of the spectacle that New York must have been in the 1860's. Think of what Coppolla did in GFII with New York of the Italian immigrant. We are given no real flavor of the time and the incredible variety of cultures that had to exist at the time. The acting was superb, and some of the scenes were incredible to see, but overall I left the theatre thinking of only one word "waste".