Wretched Refuse, Teeming Shores

Rating: 7/10 (10 December 2006)

There's no need to announce with titles that you're seeing a Scorsese film, any more than, say Kubrick, DePalma, or Adrian Lyne. His trademark is the visual depiction of violent, physical conflict as something palatable.
With "Taxi Driver", what mattered was tone...with "Raging Bull", a man who cannot square himself with the world's circle...with "Casino", the notion of the surveillance eye.
Here, we get mostly Scorsese-paint-by-numbers: the delivery of a vicarious thrill from seeing his characters chop each other up. Oh, the detail is splendid. The problem is, we've seen this before; less competently ('Titanic') or fairly competently ('Master and Commander'); the 'look how true this is to the period details' showing off that adorns the simple inevitability of the central story. Oddly, the more that Scorsese's scenes teem with extras and all their minutiae, the more fake and distant this seems.
And the more movies in this vein that I see, the more that 'Barry Lyndon' stands alone as the supreme costume drama - where the cinematic vision comes first, and the story is incidental.