Goodfellas - A Very slow paced film that has not aged well.

Rating: 6/10 (16 May 2014)

Goodfellas is based on a book which in turn is based on a real life story of Henry Hill, a person who always wanted to be a mobster and this film tells his story about he went from being a criminal to finally turning into a rat and leaving his whole mafia life behind.
I think the overall storyline is very good, it is just the way it is told, too many filler scenes that are extremely, slow, boring and do nothing for the overall plot. In particular the Heist sequence was done so terribly, they introduce members of the heist and minutes later the heist ended and members started spending money, moments later they all end up dead. This whole angle was rushed and so poorly handled. . The love story between Henry and Karen was also slow and took too long to develop and the affair angle was so fast you blinked you misses it. When Henry was arrested the second time, they handled it with a series of jumbled up scenes, that could have been handled in half the time.
Add to that the constant and annoying narration. Scorsose likes that style of storytelling, the one with narration but it is way too much here, and occasionally they would pause certain scenes and Liotta would narrate which breaks the flow of the movie, many scenes are events are explained with narration.
Ray Liotta is decent in his protagonist but the other two protagonists De Niro and Joe Pesci. Pesci is fantastic and extremely charismatic as Tommy, his scenes are fun to watch and whenever he is on the screen he demands your attention, his lines are also pretty funny. De Niro does great with the amount of screen time he gets but he does not get a lot of it and allow his character to properly develop from a rationale person to a paranoid man who thinks everybody is going to get him arrested. Liotta was not bad he gave a decent performance but there are others who could have done better in his role, he is really good in some scenes, but in emotional scenes and even the funny scenes his poor acting clearly shows, his laugh is terrible and looks fake. Some great sequences regardless. The Tommy death scene and him killing a made man was one of the interesting parts.
Overall I don't see what is so special about Goodfellas, it is an average movie, which had a great story with potential but was told in a very average and slow manner, the narrative had tons of filler and was not handled well, the main protagonist was decent at best, leaving the other two main actors to make the most of it and carry the film and steal the show. It is definitely no Godfather.
Overall: 6/10.