The "A" Team if ever there was one....

Rating: 8/10 (16 November 2019)

This is a gripping piece of cinema. Messrs. Scorsese, Pesci, De Niro & Pacino deliver a gangster movie like no other. It is a little bit long but that was really only an issue for my circulation in a rather old cinema seat. The 3Â½ hours flew by. True, we still don't actually know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa but this film offers a compelling and engrossing narrative as to what might have happened, not just to him, but to the whole Mafia-led enterprise that dominated parts of the USA in the sixties and seventies. Whether Charles Brandt's book - upon which this is based - be true, or not is almost academic. This doesn't set out to deliver history, it sets out to deliver a theory, and it does so with style and panache and illustrates with distinction the toxicity of the political situation at the time with all of its concomitant violence, thuggery and nastiness. Excellent!