A phenomenal view inside the mob lifestyle

Rating: 9/10 (15 April 2018)

Few movies purely about the life in the mob can truly capture perfection as Goodfellas manages to do so well. It has less sugarcoating compared to the more tame and inaccurate The Godfather ( Which is inferior to Goodfellas objectively speaking. ) and it has more brutality and realism.
The movie starts off with a flashback to a later scene in which a certain character is beat up, dumped into the back of a car and driven to a spot to be buried by the three main protagonists. However, when the movie starts all the audience hears is a thud, we don't know what is happening yet. As everybody gets out of the car they find this character is not dead yet, and continue to respectively stab and shoot this person to death in cold blood. After which, the iconic line 'As far back as i can remember i've always wanted to be a gangster' is said by Henry Hill's ( Ray Liotta ) narration and the story starts with a young Henry Hill. Now what Scorsese has done here is introduce us to the brutal nature of both the mob business and the three main characters in an introduction lasting for a bit longer than a minute, it is the ultimate beginning to a movie which instantly sets the tone for everything else there is to come.

You know during the entire movie that anybody could get killed at any time, and what happens is far from predictable, especially when Tommy DeVito ( Joe Pesci ) enters the screen, you have absolutely no idea what to expect. One of the other reasons Goodfellas is such a masterpiece is due to the incredible cast it has. Robert de Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci & Paul Sorvino in the lead all seem to actually be mobsters, instead of acting like them. Enhanced by further excellent performances by Lorraine Bracco & Frank Vincent, it really is an acting masterpiece of film.
The movie follows the life of Henry Hill together with excellent narraton provided by Ray Liotta from the 50s all the way up to the very start of the 80s, and as the movie starts out with the mostly positive and beneficial terms of the mob life for Henry, which usually has 50s love songs playing in the background, later in the timeline of the movie things get bloody and ugly and Scorsese both changes the tone of the songs to give it a more serious vibe and he also changes the generations of them ( for example, 50s songs for the 50s parts, 60s for the 60s.. etc. ). It immerses you into the film and the timeline that is being played at that point.
Ofcourse the single greatest sequence is the Copacabana steadycam shot through the kitchen. Trackingshots are always impressive, but even more so when it also tells the story of how popular Henry is.
With a fantastic screenplay, dialogue that never seems to be out of place, superb acting, brilliant music choices, lack of sugarcoating and actually showing the facts of how brutal the mob life can be, it is an absolute masterpiece of cinema.