Martin Scorsese might be disappointed with the lack of new ideas in Hollywood, but I am severely disappointed with the lack of new ideas from Martin Scorsese.

Rating: 4/10 (3 December 2019)

I've wanted to put my thoughts together on Marty's Mob Fetish for a while now, and this movie finally left a bad enough taste in my mouth to get me over the hump and do it. In short, if you've seen Goodfellas, Casino, or Wolf of Wall Street, you've already seen "The Irishman". Detractors would say this is a reductive argument, but I posit that this is a truth as absolute as "crime never pays", and there are several elements that I will lay out as to why I feel this way.
Each of these four stories has an overarching plot framework that can be applied to each film individually, and as a group, due to their similarity. Martin Scorsese has honed his craft down into such a science that it's become formulaic. That's not to say that the movie is poorly made, necessarily, but rather that it's not anything original, exciting, or worthy of a three-and-a-half-hour runtime, especially with how it beats over a path we've seen many times before.
To understand the formula for the movies, one must first understand the repetition of roles each of the principal actors plays in the film. Pesci is always the made man, calling the shots. Deniro is the recent convert- a young*, borderline criminal with no conscience, and even less remorse. Pacino: the big boss, always. *More on this later.
These roles remain unchanged from any previous Scorsese film involving Pacino and Pesci ("The Irishman" is Al Pacino's first production with Scorsese, somehow). In Goodfellas, Ray Liotta takes the position of the young upstart, and his associates/bad influence friends Deniro and Pesci pressure him into getting deeper into unhinged mob activities. In Casino, Deniro gets his first turn as the impressionable quasi-mobster, with Pesci again playing the crazed made man.
I mentioned a formula, and I'll try to keep it brief:
1. A young, poor, impressionable, borderline criminal man with no conscience (Liotta, Deniro, Leonardo Dicaprio, Deniro)
2. A sidekick that's a terrible influence and involved in organized (or disorganized) crime (Deniro and Pesci, Pesci, Jonah Hill, Pesci and Pacino)
3. A beautiful wife who's either a terrible person, addict, a victim, mob related or any combination thereof. (Lorraine Bracco, Sharon Stone, Margot Robbie, Stephanie Kurtzuba)
4. This combination of a principal trio of characters engage in increasingly criminal activities, beginning with insidious thefts and petty crime up to, and including wanton murder with seemingly no consequences, other than the alienation of their family and increased drug/addiction problems.
5. Many decades into the future, the wealthy life of crime comes undone from the ineptitude of some bottom tier criminal that the now-upper-management Deniro and Pesci have to deal with.
6. Somebody squeals.
7. Someone, or everyone, goes to jail, and the squealers end up dead
8. The now-old main character is recounting his story to some biographer, cop, or court.
"The Irishman" doesn't even pretend to deviate from this path laid before it by greater films. Adding to this formula, you need some family drama- because what Italian American couple can stay together without cheating? To even out the infidelity balance, rather than the drug addled, cheating wives of Wolf of Wall Street (Margot Robbie), and Casino (Sharon Stone), Scorsese flips the script back to where it began: Ray Liotta's unfaithful husband in Goodfellas, and now Deniro as the offender in "The Irishman". Naturally, their children hate them, because their fathers are consciousless monsters. But, of course, family life is no matter to a mobster- there are people to kill for little-to-no gain other than to satisfy the bloodshed quota for the film.
To that end, the violence in "The Irishman" is toned down heavily from the previous entries. This largely has to do with the age of the actors attempting to emulate the movements of much younger men; unsuccessfully, I might add.
---From the "Decider" article: Scorsese didn't want to cast younger actors for the flashbacks because he felt they wouldn't understand the world of the mob. The flashbacks-which for (Deniro) comprised like half the picture-would have to be played by younger actors. (Scorsese) said, 'What am I gonna be doing? I gotta explain everything to them?' Here, you don't have to explain," Scorsese said, laughing. Then he added more seriously, "It's about behavior: It's about how you sit, how you stand, how you say hello to somebody, how you digress in conversation."---
My BS meter started going off as soon as I saw that there was an attempt at a rationale for not casting younger actors to play a 30, 40, or 50 year old man. Even with the marvels of CGI de-aging (which is heavily utilized on Deniro, Pesci, and Pacino, to the level of uncanny valley inhuman visage), the movements of these men look like my crippled grandpa. An early scene, with Deniro kicking the hell out of a shop owner who assaults his daughter, actually made me laugh. He's so stiff and can't even raise his knee up to a 45 degree angle to stomp on a man's hand. He also supposedly throws the man through a glass door, which has to be hidden from inside the shop. It's honestly ridiculous seeing these nigh-on 80 year old men acting as men less than half their age. As the story progresses, and the age of the characters finally catches up to the actors- the makeup comes off, and the movements and their looks finally match what they're supposed to be, and for once, the suspension of disbelief returns, and it's satisfying to watch.
On the subject of the temporal- the narrative jumps around far too often. Chalk it up to an "unreliable protagonist/ramblings of an old man" but that doesn't cut it. "The Irishman" doesn't define years, decades, or ages very well, leaves a lot of details out about how people meet or become friends - such as the relationship between Deniro's Frank Sheeran, and Pacino's Jimmy Hoffa. The overarching car trip with old man Deniro and Pesci also takes place in some undefined time- the film builds up to it being a meaningful apex moment in the story, but it ends up being yet another disconnected narrative thread. There are many of these in the story. The characters age 10-15 years between scenes, and with no real understanding of where or when, (other than the period appropriate dress and the cars, which are nice attention to detail pieces) it turns into a bloated mess very quickly. I was fortunate to be able to watch this on Netflix where I could rewind and piece together who was where with what between scenes. The flow improves later in the film when everyone is introduced, but the movie also relies HEAVILY on the audience's outside knowledge of the happenings- who Jimmy Hoffa was (they joke about this, too), what his involvement with the mafia was, and if the audience had read "The Irishman" book, many more of these details would make sense, because they were certainly left out of the movie. It also doesn't help that the real life Frank Sheeran is a liar, and his story is untrue anyway.
Perhaps the ending, with its depiction of age being a real bitch, slowly creeping up on every mobster, and being a killer without fail was more poignant than it first appeared. Perhaps Martin Scorsese himself has reached the end of his creativity, and put a final nail in the coffin of the gangster flick that we were so obsessed with in the later decades of the 20th century. Hollywood is obsessed with a remake, after all.