Too short by half

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2004)

From its opening vision of hell to its final vision of heaven (almost), Gangs of New York does so much right that it is almost unbelievable that it fails to deliver emotionally. Using Hitchcock's dictum that 'The better the villain, the better the film', it deserves to be a matchless masterpiece as Daniel Day-Lewis monumentalises Bill the Butcher into the embodiment of corrupt evil.
But still, it doesn't gel, and, in the words of the unfortunate Arbogast, 'If it don't gel, it ain't aspic'.
My best guess as to the relative, and I stress *relative* failure of this wonderful undertaking is that the much-vaunted rift between Scorsese and his producers resulted in cutting that amounted to lobotomy. Of course they must leave in the set pieces that cost the millions, so let's just remove the character development that slows it up...
Fools!
When (and if - I hope) the director's cut emerges (theatrically PLEASE!!! not reduced to postage stamp size), we must surely get much more of Cameron Diaz and some of the minor characters who started out vital and then disappeared...
Clearly the work of a fine filmmaker, it just can't seem to sustain the breadth in 'only' three hours...
Keep watching the masterpieces... Mike