Unmitigated dross

Rating: Null/10 (13 December 2002)

Marty's gang prang
Well, it looks as though I'm going to be in a minority, but here goes, anyway. Personally I can barely believe this the same director who made such stunning, if not always likeable, American classics as Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Raging Bull. Two hours 45 minutes of unmitigated dross is enough to make one call into question 30 years of cinematic history.
Gangs of New York is loosely based on the gang warfare of the poverty-stricken Five Points and Bowery areas of New York during the mid-19th century, before and during the Civil War. Though very loosely based on real characters and events, Scorsese and screenwriter Jay Cocks have treated the base material with wild imagination, and the result is a hackneyed, cliché-ridden, cartoonish debacle with little convincing social or political context.
The design is sumptious and clearly very expensive - though rather 'Paint Your Wagon' - but there are few of Scorsese's trademark artistic flourishes. The only scene of real power, rather than overwhelming theatricality, is one in which Irish immigrants arriving on the quayside are given citizenship, drafted, put in uniforms and then loaded back onto ships - troopships - as the coffins of Civil War dead are simultaneously unloaded.
The film was made entirely in the CineCitta film studios in Rome, and the sets never look anything but what they are. Where one felt one could almost smell the opulence of the monied class in The Age of Innocence, the slums, dirt and crumbling buildings here are pure theme park.
Meanwhile, the opening scene of an 1846 gangfight, which sets up the remaining, predictable two-and-a-half-hour plot, is laughable in its comic-book incompetence - almost as though a film-school first-termer, having been given a couple of hundred extras, had just told them to stand around on a soundstage and pretend to strangle each other, while he sprays tomato ketchup over the lot.
After the intensity of battle scenes created for films like The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan and TV's Gettysburg and Band of Brothers, not to mention the work of action directors like Walter Hill, this is a throwback to Forties and Fifties-style filmmaking. But even the punch-up between John Wayne and Victor MacLaglen in The Quiet Man was more realistic.
Also laughably bad is the firefighters' gangbang, while there are several scenes that seem, for some reason, to have been speeded up, Keystone Cops style. The voice-over during the climactic (and unconvincing) draft riots is deeply embarrassing - one almost expects Forties-style spinning newspaper headlines. Beyond some snatches of Irish folk music, the soundtrack - U2? - is hideously out of place.
Leonardo Di Caprio is hopelessly miscast as a (supposedly) hardened, revenge-seeking son of Kerry, while Daniel Day Lewis, in curly moustache like the villain of a Victoria melodrama, is as menacing as a Woolworths Star Wars light sabre, without the batteries. Cameron Diaz barely registers, and though Jim Broadbent is OK as the corrupt Tammany Hall kingpin, William 'Boss' Tweed, it's hard to believe his character could wield any political clout.
This is Scorsese's Far And Away, with ketchup, but its sheer scale will make it an Oscar contender. It would be sadly ironic, though, if this was the film that finally won Marty the prize.