A painful disappointment

Rating: 5/10 (22 September 1999)

It is impossible for me to believe that this movie was in the same hands of the director who gave us the near-flawless previous films of the GF trilogy--not that there was much of a script with which to work. Al Pacino is dry and mechanical as the exhausted Don and it is excruciatingly obvious that he is trying to mimic the exact mannerisms of his late father, Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). Fans of the first two will pick up on this immediately. To end the saga with that foolish keeling over (hmmm, where have we seen that before?) was preposterous. The finale in the opera house was also tough to tolerate as it was clearly an (ineffective) attempt to recreate the breath-taking baptism sequence in Part I.
Andrew Garcia was good but a bit too flashy for his role. The love affair he develops with Mary (Sofia Coppola) is an annoying distraction. I have much preferred him in his subsequent roles (especially in "When a Man Loves a Woman"). Diane Keaton does her best as Kate Corleone, but, again, the script she had to work with left her character flat and shallow.