Epic but mostly gratuitous

Rating: 6/10 (5 December 2010)

The movie begins with a fierce street battle between two gangs fighting for the control of a degraded New York neighbourhood: the so-called Native Americans and a group of Irish immigrants. The former win the battle and that control for the years to come. This is supposed to have taken place in mid-nineteenth century. This battle is very well filmed, directed and acted. The usual Scorsese's mastery revealing itself once more. From then on we watch the return of the young son (Di Caprio) of the immigrant leader who was killed by the Native Americans' leader during the battle. He comes out of an orphanage with the intention of revenging his father's death. The movie goes on through scenes of great realism where we see in the streets of those New York poor quarters the proliferation of a mixture of races and nationalities where the most varied gangs dominate: petty gangs, poor gangs, rich gangs, second rate gangs, big and powerful gangsters and poor thieves and robbers. But on the top of the hierarchy there is the great chief the so-called "The Butcher" who is precisely who has killed our boy's father in the most cruel way. Till the scene of the first attempt the boy makes to kill The Butcher the movie develops itself in an atmosphere of realistic authenticity.But from then on what we watch is a series of several scenes of doubtful verisimilitude and gratuitous and meaningless violence which seem to serve only the purpose of revealing the savage and cruel nature of The Butcher. He becomes so truculent and brutal and acting with black humour into the bargain, that he turns out to be almost implausible. From a certain point on the renewed fight between the Native Americans and the Irish immigrants gets mixed in some confused way with the fight of the army conscripts (the Civil War is going on by that time) against their forced enrollment (this fact is historically true and confirmed by the way). Therefore the main value of this movie is only found in its excellent first part since in the second one it loses force in terms of ideas and verisimilitude. It ends in a somewhat clumsy and not very meaningful way in what regards the historical outcome of the fight of those two groups (if it ever actually happened any time).