Ultimate letdown...

Rating: 5/10 (31 January 2002)

People often criticize Sofia Coppola when discussing this film. Rightly so. She goes from mediocre to terrible depending on the scene.

However, this film could still be great if that was it's only flaw. I just watched all three nearly consecutively in about a 24 hour period.

First, the cast. Robert Duvall is gone. His character is gone for reasons possibly unexplained, although I think there was a hint that he had died of a heart attack. His role as the consiglierie taken by...George Hamilton. He's actually not bad but he just looks and seem out of place, probably through no fault of his own. Sofia Coppola, a beautiful girl if she would give Karl Malden his nose back, is just incapable of pulling the emotionally complex scenes off. She's fine in the less demanding scenes, making previous claims that hers is the worst performance in cinema history invalid. Crispin Glover couldn't handle ANY scene in "Rivers Edge"...but I digress... Replacing 1970s Al Pacino is the modern Al, incapable of subtle, nuanced performances. So, he sets to shouting...often. Then you have Diane Keaton. A pretty woman who still has never been attractive a day in her life. While watching this movie, I finally solved this enigma. She finds the worst hairdos any woman could possibly wear. Dear God, help this woman. She's fine though, doing what she can with the one-note character of Kay who was poorly written even in the first two Godfather movies. Then you have Andy Garcia. He has two facial expressions and two tones of voice. The expressions are "ridiculously goofy grin" and "deadpan". The tones of voice are "screaming" and "deadpan". I was always impressed with him in "When A Man Loves A Woman"...now that I think of it, I was impressed with Meg Ryan. Joining George Hamilton in the category of decent actor looking hopelessly out of place is Eli Wallach and Joe Mantegna. Neither is very convincing either, though seemingly through no fault of their own.
Then you have the plot. Some mumbo-jumbo about double crosses and triple crosses with the only original or fresh concept being the involvement of the Catholic Church and the Vatican. There's a ridiculous part where a helicopter attacks a room filled to the brim with mob bosses. I asked myself why it wouldn't have been much easier in every way to just plant a bomb. Then I realized that Andy and Al couldn't have escaped from that. The scene looks like it was shot for about twelve dollars. You only see one shot of a portion of the helicopter for a second. There's also the trouble with Talia Shire. She does do a credible job. But her character is VERY different from the Connie we knew from the first two films. Plus her make-up is bad. She has age make-up and her neck always looked perfectly smooth...except for three wrinkles that were all perfectly straight. They looked like gills...
There are a lot of great things about this film. The music is terrific, the locations and cinematography are beautiful, and the hitman in the opera house sequence is riveting. If it was being graded strictly on its own merits, I would probably think more highly of it. But the fact remains that this film falls victim to its own legacy.
I think the worst thing about the film is the frequent flashbacks to the first two films. Possibly the producers were hoping to cash in on any good will we feel towards those two masterpieces. All it succeeds on doing is reminding me how inferior the film really is to it's two superior predecessors.
The best thing about the film is Martin Scorsese's mom. She's adorable for the fifteen seconds she was in the film. Of course, all that did was remind me I could be watching "Goodfellas"...
Scale of 1 to 10...? It's a 6...