An Awful Lot Of Not Very Much

Rating: 4/10 (17 December 2019)

Let's get this out of the way first: the CGI used to youngify the leads proves that indeed you can make actors look younger, in this case a 76 year old De Niro looks like a 50 year old De Niro with too thick make up and a bad wig playing a 35 year old De Niro with dodgy knees. Yes, it's marvellous that they can de-age faces to a certain extent, but the body language is completely out of whack - as are body sizes and shapes for anyone who knows what these guys looked like in their young gun days. It's off-putting, a distraction, and a bad call all round.
I'm old enough to remember watching Raging Bull in the cinema when it first came out, being blown away by De Niro and, as a young teenager, wondering why more films weren't shot in black and white; I'd always been a fan of old black and white movies and it was a revelation that there was someone who still thought it was a good idea to shoot that way. After Raging Bull I was hooked on Scorsese and De Niro, eagerly scouring film magazines to see what each of them were up to - back then films would take months to make it across the Atlantic. I wasn't disappointed, their collaborations and individual output filled up my teenage years and saw me through college. Scorsese had The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Color of Money, Goodfellas (easily the best gangster movie since The Godfather), and even Cape Fear, a wonderful hammy genre flick that indulged both of them before returning to more grounded form with Casino. De Niro had other movies too: The Deerhunter, Once Upon A Time In America, Brazil, The Untouchables, The Mission, Angel Heart, Midnight Run, and Heat.
These are all films that The Irishman is not nearly as good as.
I think there's too much nostalgia for what Scorsese and de Niro have given us over the years, how we feel about them and their legacy is being conflated with how we ought to feel about The Irishman. I've watched it twice now and, although I quickly skimmed through it the second time, it seems to be a whole lot of hoo hah about not very much. De Niro plays Frank Sheeran, an ex-soldier and truck driver who becomes a hitman for the mob. Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino are all correct and present. Pesci quietly threatens with eyes that seem weary and weighted down by a lifetime of hard calls, Pacino always looks like the liveliest dancer in an old folks home, the one who can't sit still and wants everyone to join in whatever trouble he has brewing.
The movie plays out like the longest day of exposition. We don't really get to know these people at all. We get told a huge amount about an awful lot of stuff, but everything happens at a sit-down pace until those few moments when De Niro can gather up enough energy to walk to a location and blow something up or blow someone away - but those are only brief interludes. Honestly, even now, so soon after watching it I have trouble thinking of a memorable scene or even a line that might become quotable. Stephen Graham's Tony Pro turning up to a meeting, smug and arrogant, is pretty much as close to dangerous as this thing gets.
It all looks beautiful. The re-creation of different eras. Shop sign typography. Music. Cars. Street scenes. Clothes. All the incidental things that provide a wonderful backdrop. But gangster stories need larger than life characters to pull you in, not a bunch of old guys reminiscing about who did what to whom before looking around and realising they're the only one left breathing.
Disappointing.