Definitely doesn't whitewash the Irish

Rating: Null/10 (6 January 2003)

The posters who complain about the Irish being portrayed as overly sympathetic to blacks during the Draft Riots were apparently in the restroom during that scene. Either that, or they had a very different take on the numerous shots of black men being brutally beaten, lynched, and set on fire by the Irish rioters. I for one came away more shaken by those scenes than by any other scene of violence in this already hyper-violent film.
In fact, Scorsese should be credited for showing us the darkness on both sides of a conflict that a lesser filmmaker could easily have debased into a hackneyed good vs. evil melodrama.