Remembering the good ole days

Rating: 7/10 (14 January 2020)

I've been wanting to watch this movie since it was first announced and after they released it on Netflix and highly praised reviews started popping out all over the internet I was even more eager to grind my teeth into this "another crime masterpiece of Scorsese's" but for some reason have been delaying it until tonight. And maybe because of my mountain high expectations I disliked the movie from the beginning. SGI and de-aging visuals were very poorly executed and whereas the main characters should all have been 40-ish looked just over 60 anyway. Bad that's OK, accuracy in a Scorsese movie is simply forgivable if a script is great and it sadly wasn't the case either. Who wrote the script? It feels like the majority of the lines were improvised by actors on the spot, I haven't witnessed more repetitive and incoherent dialogues in my whole life. Robert De Niro plays a parody of Robert De Niro, I don't know if it was intentional, but it was surely annoying to see him walk through the whole 209 minutes wearing the same facial expression of grumpiness. Sad. Al Pacino was at times overacting but overall good and I enjoyed his performance a lot better but Joe Pesci, having returned from his retirement for this movie, was absolutely brilliant. Overall the movie seems to be no more than a recollection of memories told by an old man in agony to get them off his chest before he dies; it doesn't show any growth of characters (exactly because all of them were old) whatsoever but is nevertheless a very fine movie.