Oldfellas

Rating: 8/10 (30 November 2019)

Having Pacino, DeNiro and Pesci in these roles 25 years ago would have been perfect. They were 3 of the screens best mobsters, right up there with Cagney, Bogart and EG Robinson. But unfortunately old age and/or death comes to all of and this trio are respectively 79/76 & 76 which makes them far to old to play characters that exist in a time frame from 1955-75, for about 90% of the the 3:30 running time, which is long even for a Scorsese film. But then Hollywood loves to sanitize war and cop movies by usually having guys in their 40's & 50's in positions that in real life would be filled by young men who tend to believe they are immortal and in an effort to prove their manhood will do incredibly risky things. My guess is that OC works much the same way-most of the foot soldiers are younger although the old mobsters remain targets. In any case, "The Irishman" is an interesting film, bringing back a number of other actors who previously worked for Scorsese on his other mob films or appeared in "The Sopranos" or "Boardwalk Empire" among others. If you can get past the age discrepancy it's not bad although DeNiro's perpetually laconic and laid back portrayal of the title character worked better for Robert Mitchum in his day. Way too long though-could have easily edited an hour from this. My guess is Netflix might eventually break this up into a 4-5 episode series, probably other footage they could throw in.