Vivid, powerful and marked by Day-Lewis's magnificent performance, it does not quite live up to its promise.

Rating: 8/10 (4 March 2003)

Few movies begin as well as Gangs of New York' does. Priest' Vallon (Liam Neeson), watched by his young son, girds himself for battle, gathering about him a barbaric, rag-tag band of Irish immigrants as he walks through fire-lit tunnels and chaotic halls, then out into the still whiteness of an 1846 winter's day in New York's Five Points district. Out in the square he is met by his rival William Bill the Butcher' Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), who heads the Nativists, an American-born Protestant gang. Then, with all the ceremony of Homeric battles, the gangs go to war.
Sixteen years later Vallon's son, now calling himself Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns to Five Points where he seeks to re-establish himself. As an awesome aerial shot makes clear, Five Points is the grimy, crime-riddled heart of New York, which Amsterdam describes as less of a city than a furnace, or a furnace in which a city might one day be forged.' Here he meets the lovely Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), a thief and a con-artist, and is taken under the wing of the man he has come to kill, Bill the Butcher himself.
When he meets Amsterdam the Butcher introduces himself as New York' and indeed his character towers over both Five Points and the movie. Orator, crimelord, father-figure, racist, patriot, sadist, warrior, showman, Day-Lewis rolls them up into one unforgettable moustached tyrant. It is a magnificent performance. Next to it, DiCaprio's Amsterdam is inevitably a bit pale, but he still does well. Do not imagine that this is a replay of Titanic's charming pretty-boy  Amsterdam is, like the movie itself, angry, violent, conflicted and charismatic. Diaz is unconvincing but the rest of the cast bring to life the vivid assortment of crooks, whores, corrupt policemen and underhanded politicians who fill the movie.
Like all serious dramas dominated by larger-than-life characters like these, Gangs of New York' is often in danger of getting overblown and sometimes becomes so. Though it is packed with great scenes, like when three different men pray to the same god, each claiming his power for their own, or a long tracking shot showing Irish immigrants arriving in the harbour, becoming citizens, being signed up to fight the Civil War and boarding a ship that is unloading coffins, Gangs' does begin to drag after a gripping scene at the anniversary party of the 1846 battle. A long film, it does end strongly though not with the power it promised to have. So it is not one of director Martin Scorscese's greatest films but it is still outstanding, a dirty, gory, intense and beautifully realised epic. It does also have some depth: like many of his other films, such as Mean Streets', Taxi Driver' or Goodfellas', Gangs of New York' shows Scorscese's loving and loathing vision of his home and how in that city, as in the rest of the nation, blood, crime and hatred were, are and will remain an integral part of America. In the times we live in it is a theme worth thinking about.
8/10