Plan 9 From Sicily -- But Not Quite So Bad

Rating: 4/10 (6 February 2019)

For years I heard legends about how awful this movie was, and then finally I bought all three GODFATHER movies on Blu Ray from TARGET.
This movie is bad, all right, but not that bad. People always knock the younger stars in the cast, Andy Garcia, Bridget Fonda, and especially Sophia Coppola, but really I thought they were all fairly attractive and sympathetic. The tragic love affair between Vincent and Mary would have been so much more powerful and moving if sexy, wisecracking modern girl Grace Hamilton hadn't just vanished without explanation half an hour into the picture! (Is that a spoiler? Trust me, you won't have to waste the next two and a half hours hoping to see Bridget again. That drove me nuts!)
So what kills the movie isn't the (weak) attempt to build new characters, but the horrifically ugly and stupid way the older characters are stripped of all human dignity, human emotion, and all reality. Al Pacino yells, he screams, he twitches, he drools, and instead of making Michael more human, he makes him less human every time he opens his mouth. And its just the same with the background characters. In the first two movies just a single shot of some old Sicilian's face would show you how dangerous he was and what kind of world he came from. Here even the minor dons are treated as clowns. ("My lucky coat!" shouts an old Mustache Pete, caught in the middle of an inadvertently hilarious gangland massacre.)
People talk a lot about how the plot makes no sense in this movie. It doesn't. But there's a larger problem. The movie is set in 1979. A lot has happened in the world since the last Godfather ended. The Vietnam War, race riots, feminism, the total destruction of many old values and prejudices. But the Corleone family is still operating like the world has never changed. The plots about drug trafficking and corruption in the church are so unsatisfying precisely because they don't show the Corleone world being challenged or threatened by outsiders. We hear about blacks but we don't see them. We hear about Colombians but don't see them either. And Mary Corleone for all her headstrong passion seems to have no life outside the home.
In the first two movies, the outside world was a threat, but that threat was made credible and dramatic by the conflict with formidable outside villains -- Jack Woltz, the movie producer. Police Captain McCluskey, Hyman Roth. Fidel Castro! But this movie has a lifeless, incestuous feel -- even the villains are insiders, family members. Coppola hints at the venal corruption of the Vatican, but he settles for trivial stuff like embezzlement and fraud and never even hints at the real horrors -- and you know what I'm talking about!