Breathless But Bewildering

Rating: 7/10 (3 January 2013)

This has enough violence and gritty street stuff to be another intriguing descent into the world of crime and punishment for Scorsese and his blend of attractive brutality, but it is vastly overrated. It can be confusing and less than engaging as its myriad of mobsters and cops parade in and out of frame with varying results of believability.
The acting and characterizations are all over the place with wide ranges of volume and machismo. One example is that the affairs of the heart here are never founded and come across as less than real. Take the scene in the restaurant. Is that for one minute real with its forced laughter? Or the bedroom/sex scene.
It is a movie that seems full of itself rather than full. The complexities are so twisted and run by so fast that its hard to keep up with it all. It could be that the pacing is such to give it that dizzying feeling of being trapped like a rat in the bowels of the beast, but its breathless energy sucks the life out of the story and its just whiz-bang, bang, bang, bang.
While not without its attractions of audacious anarchy, and it delivers so much that it is hard not to get involved in the goings-on. But the Director has made many better films and one cannot get the feeling that the adulation for this one is misplaced or in place of past disregards.