If Game of Thrones were a 3-hour movie... it'd feel like this

Rating: 8/10 (24 July 2013)

It's a crying shame Scorsese didn't wait another ten years to make Gangs of New York, which was subject to money issues and constrictions that kept it from being the fully realized masterpiece that it could have been. Instead, it's a bit rushed, and the necessary violence feels bludgeoning. Some of these characters are rather important thematically to the story, and it takes multiple viewings (a la Godfather) before you can really 'read between the lines' and understand why "this guy got hammered" and "this person hates this person." The why, essentially, is off the table, because there's no real time for it, and what we're left with is quick and nasty tableau of nightmares, much in the way you'd feel if you woke up from a coma and suddenly found yourself in Egypt post-Mubarak. You have to understand something before you can no longer fear it, and the America we're presented with in this film is dark, dirty, bloody, and all together terrifying, owing more to a post-apocalyptic Mad Max than a genuine American epic. Holding a narrative together is a simple revenge fantasy that pits an Irish-Catholic immigrant's son (and who's to say the boy wasn't born in America- irony of ironies, he's only ten or so in the film's prologue) against a Know-Nothing Nativist (Bill the Butcher, played with stunning ferocity by Daniel Day-Lewis). Bookending this garish chronicle is the off-putting music of Irish-band U2, fittingly picked but somewhat surprisingly allowed to plug in, giving the prologue a rather silly MTV vibe.
Does all this make it a bad movie? Actually, no, I feel it's one of Scorsese's better and worthwhile films (just certainly not his best). There's definitely a personal touch to it and it's historical accuracy is fairly on-the-spot. However, when you have to highlight a load of bloodshed and massacre for 168 minutes in order for the narrative to make sense, you're left with something like Howard Zinn's "A People's History"... a very cynical look at something that needs room to breathe and angles to examine. You need the why? Unlike Zinn's history, this film isn't meant to outrage and isn't trying to exploit, and you can tell this is the case. But the violence is numbing. Imagine if Scorsese had directed Game of Thrones and stuffed a bunch of George R R Martin books into one 168 minute massacre.... Well, the history here is just as complicated, if not more so. Gang needed a Boardwalk Empire style presentation, it needed to be a series. But I don't blame Scorsese for making it when he did. He had been trying for 20 years to get it made, and Band of Brothers, that great WW2 series that turned epic storytelling on premium channels into something that could be conceivably accomplished, was just out of the starting gate as Gangs went to print.
Erich von Stroheim would've killed to have that kind of unrestricted license. For this piece, Martin Scorsese would've been better served by it.