the most overrated director in America

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 2002)

Lots of people (mostly film critics and those who listen to them) will think this is filmmaking art, but after the word gets out, the great mass of sensible people will stay away from Gangs of New York in droves. Look for this to be a total dud as a video rental.
Violence, like sex, sells. Add a little style and you've got a middling career like Scorcese's. This film school graduate thinks he's got something BIG to say about THE BIRTH OF AMERICA.
Don't believe it. With the exception of Taxi Driver, there's something hollow at the core of Scorcese's work. If he had read more books as a child instead of going to movies, he might have learned how to tell a story (Don't look for one here). He also might have learned how to portray fully developed three-dimensional characters.
There aren't any here, except for maybe Daniel Day-Lewis, whose cartoonish Bill the Butcher might replace The Shining's Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) as Hollywood's favorite psycho. But he won't because The Shining was a good movie and this isn't. Day-Lewis is like an all-pro NFL player playing for a team at the bottom of its division. Leonardo DiCaprio isn't really a bad actor (see him perform in This Boy's Life) but, unlike Day-Lewis, he doesn't have the gifts to make anything out of a script like this.