Goodfellas... good, but not great

Rating: 8/10 (18 November 2005)

After renting the first three seasons of The Sopranos, I decided to rent Goodfellas, a film I had heard and read so many good things about. After watching the movie, I was a bit disappointed. The beginning of the film worked well for me - one could really get in the head of young Henry and understand what turned him on to the wise guy life. I loved the detail in the first third of the film. The storytelling took a bad turn for me, though. Everything after his marriage seemed to spiral out of a personal reality and into a "this happened, and then that happened, and then that..." form of storytelling. The last third just moved too fast for me; I lost my connection to the characters and by the time the end credits rolled around I wasn't connected to the gravity of what was going on. All in all, Goodfellas is a good film, but it is not the mob classic I was expecting it to be.