as good as the first

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 2005)

It's hard to decide which is the better Godfather movie. The brilliant stroke here is that Coppola does not present a typical sequel. Events move both forward and backward. Roberto De Niro is at his best as the young Vito Corleone. The assassination of the local mafia don is a particularly effective moment. In a way this movie is a reference to the American dream of success but in this case it is the success of the gangster. Coppola is so great at making this a simple human drama that we forget that it is a film about a criminal element of our society. Older movies, like those with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney showed us the gangster as cool but with no family ties. Here we see these immigrant people as family people but with a decidedly twisted morality. That morality is explained early in the Godfather 2 when we learn about Vito's past. The combination of this element with the more recent problems of power tha t Michael Corleone has to deal with make this a great and unusual film.