If you enjoyed the first two, spare yourself the agony of this one

Rating: 1/10 (27 November 2001)

-This movie is awful on two counts: as a finale to the trilogy and as a stand-alone film. This shows in the poor character development, the abundance of meaningless shots, and lastly, and most importantly in my mind, the meaninglessness of the dialogue. -All of the integrity of the characters from the first two Godfathers is completely done away with in the first sequence. -Michael, a taciturn, introverted, calculating megalomaniac in the first two films is lavish, loose-lipped, pathetic in his control over his family, and careless as he never was and never would have been by the first two movies. -Constanza is all of a sudden involved in the family affairs. Joe Mantegna plays a terribly thin enemy of the family, Joey Zasa, but can't be blamed as an actor with such a flimsy script. Andy Garcia overacts every one of Vincent Corleone's lines and every step--he practically goosesteps. Tom Hagan is missing and leaves a giant hole. It doesn't matter that Sofia Coppola can't act, because she had nothing to work with anyway--she plays a whinging, incestuous brat poorly, but convincingly (!). -The first dramatic sequence involves a conflict between Joey Zasa and Vincent mediated by Michael, who is trying to go legit, but can't seem to do it. Vincent tries to convince Michael that Zasa is "an enemy" in a very un-Godfatherly manner: a) he does it right in front of Zasa, b) he does so simply because Zasa supposedly says, "F*ck Michael Corleone," behind his back, and c) he disobeys Michael right in the room by biting Zasa's ear off. -This is juvenile drama. There is no tension that lasts longer than a sequence. There is no reason motivating the characters. There is no real respect for anything--all the subtleties of the family traditions are stomped on, which makes the highly visual sequences, loaded with symbols, cheap because the symbols mean nothing to the characters. -The haughty diction is only pretension void of any understanding of respect and the values that drive the family and Michael in particular. Michael, a very chiseled character in the first two movies, becomes paper thin, with no real idea that is central to his action. All his actions in the first movie and the facades he puts on as Don in the second movie show an aspiration to an ideal or, at least, an aspiration to appear as this ideal. He has none of this in the third film and this change of character doesn't happen on screen, nor is it explained. We're left only to believe that Coppola and Puzo tore this one off in a frenzied weekend when the purse got light. -The story lacks direction, focus, has nothing in particular to say, but that's not condemnable unto itself. The dialogue, however, is worthy of a pair of misguided high school kids who watched the first two movies and figured they knew what respect was because they saw one guy shoot another and a bunch of people get scared. None of the dialogue is loaded with the layers of meaning and subtlety that exist in the first two. All the characters are brash and stereotypical, or, in the case of a few, like Enzo the Baker and Bridget Fonda's character, tokens and a waste of celluloid. -Though Godfather III isn't worth its score in Scrabble, it is, however, a testament to Pacino as an actor, that with such flimsy stuff he still manages to act compellingly.