Not The Godfather

Rating: 7/10 (29 November 2019)

The first 15' are a masterpiece. The good use of voice over helps to create the perfect origin story for the protagonist, remembering his childhood, while naturally dropping needed exposition for the whole story to work. It's perfect.
But I have to be honest, that's kind of the peak of the movie. I just don't think Ray Liotta was good enough to make me enjoy the film, nor it was his character. And I know it was based on real life, but that didn't harm De Niro and Pesci, which were awesome.
And Lorraine Bracco tried but couldn't save another terrible and annoying female character "written" by Scorsese (with Taxi Driver, a terrible one, with The King of Comedy, an annoying one). To be fair to Scorsese, plenty of his characters are obnoxious, so I'm not sure this is sexism. And yes, the character is based in real life, so maybe, just maybe, he was being true to life to a fault. My point: why she had to have so much screen time if that's all she was (terrible character)? It wasn't really that important to the main plot.
Anyways. It is technically, a great movie. It tells a really complex and quite big story, with a brutality that is welcomed, and some scenes are beyond great (all of them involve Pesci and De Niro).
But:
He overuses the voice over (it works when the film is a character study or at least when it's only one character doing it).
The insistence on making characters annoying, actually annoyed me.
And the ambivalent performance from the lead (he works well when sentimental and really poorly otherwise), plus the unnecessary large part for "the annoying wife", all of them converge to create another flawed masterpiece.
Because "Godfather", this ain't.