A load of drivel.

Rating: 5/10 (12 February 2020)

A 3-hour long Goodfellas tribute featuring elderly people.
A 58-year-old meat delivery driver with no pals and a bad back besties with an aged local mobster and gives up the day job to do mobster stuff.
The story is retold Ray Liotta style by his son in an old people's home.
The film starts off well enough, with some predictable but captivating 80's/90's mob-movie cinematographic cliches (some examples below) that look good on a 4k telly.
It was enough to see me about half an hour of watching this through, when I felt the urge to play with my phone.
Three quarters of an hour, or so, in, I discovered myself playing online chess against a friend. I think it around then I realised I had forgotten the movie was on, and I had no idea what was happening in it.
After chess, I put my phone down, tried to get roughly to where I last remembered being.
Managed about another half hour or so from that general area, before I went to make a cup of tea and forgot to go back.
I let The Irishman fairytale ramble on to an empty sofa for another hour or so before I switching off the Netflix app.
The next evening, refreshed, I was re-determined to watch the thing.
So I changed tack.
I decided to treat The Irishman like a mini TV series.
Every day, I vowed, I would try and get through a little bit of The Irishman at a time, and at some point, it would end - at least, I presume it ends at some point - and I would therefore have seen this thing in its entirety.
This didn't work. Although I'd like to thank Netflix for the 'continue watching from where you left off' function, which meant at least I was able to give it a good go.
I've no idea at what point I gave up on The Irishman, other than it was on the third day of trying to watch the damn thing.
The Irishman is the movie equivalent of a novel which nobody reads through to the end. The last half hour could be an episode of The Simpsons for all I care.
If there's any kind of conclusion you can tell me or not as you please - I am incapable of giving a chuff.
The Irishman is a load of utter drivel with - spoiler alert - a storyline that becomes less and less credible as it goes along to as far as anyone can be bothered watching.
I'd be a more forgiving if this had been produced by a bunch of start-ups. If that were the case, I'd give it 6/10 stars for effort.
But it's not. It's a film produced by people who are normally top of their game who all had an off year, all at the same time, and all together.
But it doesn't mean the team haven't done excellent work in the past, and it doesn't mean they can't do again so in the future.
It was directed by the bloke most famous for The Godfather - and you probably know this, cos you're on IMDb - and some of the bits I managed to get through did have flavourings of Casino.
But I reckon The Irishman copies the majority of its cliches from Goodfellas: The background narration the obvious main one, but also the sweeping location shots, side pans into street corner Italian restaurants, short clips of violence, newspaper clips, that sort of thing.
Oh yeah: and Deniro, and the bloke from 'Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot'.
There's no Ray Liotta though. That guy would have made it a cliche.

If you like the way the 1990 film was put together you might enjoy some of these bits here too.
There's quite a few nice old cars and trucks to look at, and they've done a great job of putting locations, although not the main actors, into period.
If all the scenes with dialogue and violence were cut, you would end up with a quite good two or three minutes of cinematography that could make a decent enough 'retail mode' sequence for televisions in showrooms.
Another alternative use: one could switch off the picture and get on with stuff around the house. Deniro will chat on in the background like a warm, familiar, permanent companion. It would actually be like being in the old folk's home with him. That could be quite nice.
But as a film, nah.
Those who lamented this movie not coming out on the big screen had evidently not attempted to see the thing before making comment.
Cinemas dodged a bullet by missing out on The Irishman. Had they screened it, the future of the industry would have been at stake.