An "Epic", In Every Sense Of The Word.

Rating: 10/10 (5 September 2014)

Epic, violence, greed and love. Many themes that are present and explored in Sergio Leone's final epic "Once Upon A Time In America". I suppose I must explain the injustice of what happened to Leone's work. Ten years in the making, the film was originally suppose to be 4 hours and 30 minutes long. Due to creative differences and distributions, the European cut was 3 hours and 40 minutes. The American cut however, was a mere 2 hours long. The narrative was beyond broken and everything made no sense leaving Leone reportedly heartbroken, vowing never to make another film and would sadly pass away a few years later. Luckily for us, it's been reported someday that Leone's children and the movies composer Ennio Morricone, will collect all four and a half hours and have a definitive cut soon underway. Onto the review.
In essence, I find the story one I think all of us know somewhere deep in the back of our brain (which gives a weight to the proposed "Opium" dream theory). Kids growing up as best of friends get themselves involved in organised crime, and now all is left is to wait for the inevitable crash. It would be incredibly rude of me to sum up the movie as just that, because for those people who have watched the film know that the performances and friendship between Robert De Niro and James Woods's character is remarkable. The visual look of the ghetto's are grand, rustic and BIG on scale. The camera is shot so well you'd swear you were looking from the eyes of the children.
As well as looking extremely authentic, we are told a very well plotted narrative that spans into each friends 60+ years of living. We begin with an old David "Noodles" Aaronson (Robert De Niro), smoking in a Chinese opium den as he reflects on his lifetime as a child and a young adult. So far we have seen that he is on the run in the present time, then almost immediately we jump to Noodles's early years making what he can of the depression and meeting a young Max (James Woods). As we meet the gang at a young age (Fantastic performances from these child actors), good times and tragedy are always frequent. Years later, Noodles and Max eventually meet again and my how times have changed.
Again, what I've just wrote in the last couple of paragraphs, doesn't even begin to go deep enough to explain what happens in the first act. I really do not wish to tell you what happens, because there is virtually no way to explain the grand scope of this film. It hardly feels like a movie but more of an experience, one of which would feel criminal if I told you anymore about it. But as I will constantly say, the casting and acting is fantastic. The camera work by Leone as always is flawless, and the score for this movie is so big on scale I swear it could rival Nino Rota's score for "The Godfather" (1972).
Final Verdict: The greatest gangster movie ever made. When people talk about Leone's work such as "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" (1966), they always refer to how strong the characters are. Please believe me when I say that these characters are some of the most strongest archetypes I have ever seen, and this film is Sergio Leone's Masterpiece. In the words of Roger Ebert, "An epic poem of violence and greed". Need we say more? 10/10.