Bunch of Blarney

Rating: 1/10 (3 December 2019)

America's most over-regarded purveyor of middle-brow dreck churns out another pile of celluloid blarney.
If you can look past the attempt to turn a couple of septuagenarians into young go-getters, the first half-hour of this movie is sorta compelling. Heck, I was just happy to see Pesci back on the screen after an eternity away.
But once the movie starts to focus on that worthless slimeball Jimmy Hoffa, to the exclusion of any subplots, this becomes one of the most turgid movies I've suffered through in a long time. Nobody under the age of 50 knows who Hoffa was, much less cares that he's buried under the endzone at Giants Stadium.
After a while I alternated between looking at my watch and wondering whether DeNiro's alien eyes were due to contact lenses or special effects. Either way, he looks like a character who wandered over from Avatar.
The scene at the awards ceremony where DeNiro as Paddy McSheen - or whatever his name was - and Pacino as Hoffa stand face-to-face and keep repeating, ''this is it" or ''it is what it is," or ''is this it," ad nauseam, my goodness, shoot me.
I'm no longer surprised Scorcese couldn't get this garbage distributed in theatre chains. It's obvious now that he plotzed it into three arthouse theatres where nobody would see it over a holiday weekend, and then sold it to the s3ckers at Netflix. THEN had the audacity to go on a media tour where the gullible media peddled the narrative that he'd planned it this way all along and somehow this was breaking new ground in how movies are watched. Moviegoers have been played for fools on this one, esp Netflix subscribers.