Well acted, thoughtfully crafted, painfully slow

Rating: 6/10 (26 January 2020)

Martin Scorcese is not the first elderly director who decided to slow things down. It's not uncommon; age seems to cause some auteurs to become fascinated by the slow pace of real life and try and emulate it in film.
Anyway, The Irishman is slow. It's a fairly interesting story with interesting very well-acted characters, but every scene plays out fully; you don't just get the basics, you get all the digressions and pauses and irrelevant asides. Any ten-minute scene in the film would be a five-minute scene in most movies.
What happens in these slow scenes is sometimes very interesting. And at times there is a horror underneath that is underlined by the calm, leisurely attitude of the principles. But this all still requires a lot of patience. And I've always preferred Scorcese's fast-moving films (After Hours, Taxi Driver) to his slow ones (Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ).
Maybe at 60 I'm just not old enough for this movie. Sure, it's interesting to watch a movie that follows gangsters from brutal youth to doddering age, but it's not *that* interesting. Maybe it will be in another 20 years.
I know it's supposed to be a brilliant work of cinema, but personally I'd say skip it unless you really like slow-paced movies.