A bloated, self-indulgent epic fail

Rating: 1/10 (15 April 2011)

A few very rich people and a great many very talented people, not least Snr. Leone, invested a great deal of time, talent and moolah to bring this movie to completion. It shows, and the movie is a rich spectacle - but nothing more. No-one should waste their time watching this except to learn how to overspend on art direction. I just want four hours of my life back. Naively, I sat through endless period son-et-lumiÃ©re, gratuitous sex and violence, dubious ageing makeup jobs, unrealistic dialogue and nondescript music, hoping that the ending would tie it all together in a satisfying way. Epic fail. It's a bad B-movie plot dressed as The Sting.
*SPOILER* Noodles (De Niro, wasting his prime - the ridiculous name of the protagonist says it all) returns to New York after 30 years to find he has been advanced a million bucks for a hit, but why? It's Max, (James Woods) his boyhood gang chum that he thought he'd double-crossed and got killed, wanting Noodles to kill him before the real baddies get hold of him. What rubbish; after all, a million buys a lot of secret hideaway. It is so telling that the movie's premise considers a huge sum of money a good enough maguffin to hang a four-hour marathon melodrama on. Mild, ostentatious tedium follows - mystified, Noodles wanders from mausoleum to left luggage office to cold-cream besmeared dancer's dressing room, all the while flashing back to a squeaky-clean 1930's gangland, where we eventually learn that it is a bad idea to call Max 'crazy'. Because instantly he goes crazy, in a piece of character development that probably had the Scooby-Doo writers looking to their laurels. That was said of 'Bugs' Moran, actually - you didn't call him 'Bugs' to his face.
There's no chance of any such real-life wit or irony in this script. No chance of any reality at all, because the intention seems to have been to make grand opera, so it doesn't matter that a man can be forced to sit in a vat of gasoline (and drink it) yet jump out when rescued as though it were gameshow gunk. It doesn't matter that driving a car at speed into a quay with no-one wearing belts would result in a bloody mess, not male bonding. Grand opera requires grand passion to drive the plot; Noodles' only passion is for looking at length through one of the movies' two terribly unconvincing peepholes at a budding ballet dancer, whom he goes on to rape. As you do; another piece of meaningless quasi-characterisation. Grand opera requires grand symbolism to resonate with people; there is no symbolism in OUATIA, the whole thing is a completely pedestrian display of directorial indulgence. But then, in 1984 we all thought the money would last forever. This movie certainly feels like it.