what is this mess?

Rating: 3/10 (7 October 2006)

I'd have seen this film regardless of the reviews. Scorcese has directed some of the most significant, dramatic and best-told stories of our time, and with Nicholson, Damon, DeCaprio, Baldwin, Sheen, Walberg and the rest, it at least had a solid chance to be a tour de force. It's a mess, though, dragged down to lousy by a screenplay written by the same misguided pen of that disaster-bore-embarrassment "Kingdom Of Heaven". Bad or no structure can't be saved by over-cranking the ragefest volume.
It's hard to say why Marty needs to wallow in even deeper pools of perpetual manic violence and blood at this point in his career. Maybe he still just likes it. Maybe he's feeling like we need to take some people out. Maybe the only way he could punctuate and hold together this cluster was with regular, loud, brain blasting, because if it weren't for the continuous bang-bang-blast, in-your-face-insults and face-punch scenes the story would've resembled a garbage pile. An interesting plot line was strung together by an amateur, though fortunately you've got watchable actors, some wry funny lines and a few outrage scenes that pop.
The screenplay's choppy, the edits and lighting choices are weird, and the script's incongruent in a bad way. It never builds a tempo. That's Scorcese's fault. It was a great shame to see great actors content with accepting performance mania in lieu of characters. So in spite of all the odd-crazy, there're also huge bald spots. Nobody in this film goes beyond one-dimensionally anger-crazed, with the possible exception of DeCaprio. Still, I couldn't understand how Leo didn't explode during this film; he goes from appearing over-stressed and over-drugged to rage-psycho. I felt possessed to snort Ajax watching his crazed eyes and jaw grinding for 2 hours.
I give it a '3' -- there's enough good violence to feel punched up after a numbing week at work.