A travesty - just awful

Rating: Null/10 (26 December 2000)

Let me be a bit more precise: If you were to see this movie without having seen or known much about the first two (and why would you do that, pray tell?), you might find it a mildly entertaining Hollywood production, marred by ham acting, a script that covers a lot of ground to no good effect, and egregious Italianamerican stereotypes. Coming to it with a knowledge of the first two films, what I saw was a travesty - a totally unnecessary film that unintentionally parodied most of what was great about its predecessors.
The critics were pretty kind to Godfather III when it came out, no doubt out of the respect for I and II. But the truth is quite dismal.
Where to even begin? In place of the powerfully minimal, understated performances he gave in I and II, Al Pacino gives yet another of the scenery-chewing exhibitions he's been prone to of late. The part where he chauffeurs Diane Keaton around Sicily looks like it was accidentally thrown in from a bad cable-TV travelogue. Talia Shire's performance is a kitsch-fest of Italianamerican cliches. Although perversely entertaining, it has nothing to do with the character she created in the first two films. George Hamilton as the consigliere instead of Robert Duvall? What were they thinking??? The only reason Sofia Coppola isn't laughed off the screen is because all the other performances here are so broadly awful that she actually comes across as somewhat understated (although her Valley Girl intonations are pretty hopeless).
One of the great things about Godfathers I and II was the way they avoided cliches and gave dignity to Italian American characters in a setting that's usually been used to stereotype them, and in fact used them to comment not on mafia corruption but on the corruption of America itself. Not here! The penultimate scenes with the poison canoli at the opera are Italianamerican kitsch to the Nth, and the killing on the opera house steps that follows is just bad Verdi.
It's clear this movie was made entirely for the bucks. Coppola and Puzo had nothing left to say about these characters. Let's just pretend it doesn't exist, shall we?