This movie is about the sets

Rating: Null/10 (25 December 2002)

`Gangs of New York' is a little bit like a Verdi Opera. Yes, there is a story, and often very dramatic and tragic at that. However, the story really does not matter. In Verdi's case, the travails of the heroes and the exact logic behind the events are just background to the main goal  the music and the singing. In `Gangs' the protagonists do not sing (though one wish they did, it would have made for a much more interesting film); still the main accomplishment here is not the story or the (very inaccurate) telling of New York's history. This movie is primarily about the sets. It tries to convey an atmosphere, a certain ambience, the street scenery of New York of the 1860s as imagined or wished by Scorsese (from all available evidence we know that New York of the Civil War era did not resemble at all what we are shown in `Gangs'). So  never mind that the houses in `Gangs' miss a front wall to allow us to peek inside; never mind that Daniel Day-Lewis plays the frightening' arch-villain `Bill the Butcher' as if Bill were a bumbling buffoon (with a Peter Falk New York accent to boot); never mind that all characters are flat, totally predictable, and stereotypical. Also, while this is not the first time that Scorsese's plots `do not make sense', at least in his other movies (notably the hilarious `After Hours') you were supposed to care. Here the contradictions do not really matter. Once you understood that this movie is first and foremost about the aesthetics of the scenery, `Gangs of New York'  with it mob and bar scenes, the riots, and the elephants in the streets  literally looks very impressive.