The long good-bye

Rating: 3/10 (28 November 2019)

By the time we got to the wood chipper spewing out body bits, I had my metaphor for The Irishman - it was as if Scorsese had taken Goodfellas, Casino, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and The Sopranos, put them all into an industrial sized shredder, and concocted this bloody blob of a film.
Long gone are the young Vito Corleone and Michael Corleone of Godfather II, (and the much ballyhooed "de-aging" effect doesn't bring them back.) But they are replaced by an Al Pacino who morphed into John Turturro and a Robert De Niro who has deteriorated into a sad parody of his former self. Who would have thought that Joe Pesci would be the shining star of this acting troika, but he has the one decent performance in this dreadful picture.
I didn't read the book the film is based on but the script is terrible. One example of many is Frank Sheeran's (De Niro in the title role) daughter character, played by Anna Paquin as an adult. She seems to be the only one of the four daughters and two wives who suspects that daddy may be a monster. Although she has hardly any lines, we can tell she hates him by the many repetitive scenes of her giving Frank death-ray stares. And it makes this cold-blooded killer feel really bad (calling Tony and Meadow Soprano! But at least Meadow had dialogue, a personality, and a nuanced relationship with her father.)
And speaking of dialogue, the various conversations between De Niro and Pacino (Jimmy Hoffa) and/or Pesci (a gangster whose name I've already forgotten) are beyond absurd in the nonsensical, elliptical way they speak as they keep putting out hits on their rivals.
While I'm passing out the raspberries, Robbie Robertson's musical score seems like it was written for another film entirely. But at least they used In the Still of the Night a couple of times and don't miss the short bit of Steve Van Zandt playing Jerry Vale singing Al di La in the mandatory night club scene.
And perhaps the final insult is that after three and a half hours of this mess, Frankie, we hardly knew ye.