From spaghetti to Noodles!

Rating: 5/10 (24 January 2007)

Sergio Leone, best known as the godfather of spaghetti Westerns, here makes a film about a gangster called Noodles. With its broad historical sweep, achronological story lines, three hour-plus runtime and generous score (written by longtime collaborator Ennio Morricone), it's nothing if not ambitious. Indeed, some of the balletic collages of music and images in this movie resemble no other film more than '2001: A Space Oddysey', which is certainly not something you can say of most gangster movies. Unfortuantly, the dialogue and characterisation are not as strong as the imagery, the conclusion to the plot doesn't quite convince (or indeed, pack a big enough punch to wholly satisfy after a movie of this length), and at times the film seems almost to endorse its central characters' crude, and sometimes sexually violent, world view. It features a handsome leading couple in Robert de Niro and Elisabeth McGovern; but it's a shame that its substance is not as distinctive as the style.