Goodfellas Turning Over in its Grave

Rating: 1/10 (27 November 2019)

At an epic run-time of over three hours, you'd think director Martin Scorsese would make something more liken to an addictive limited cable series than an epic about absolutely nothing. It is, however, about someone, and that's Jimmy Hoffa played by a CGI-youthful Al Pacino, who, with Robert De Niro as sidekick "house painter" i.e. assassin Frank Sheeran, are involved in endless dialogue leading absolutely nowhere...
Unlike Scorsese's mob classic GOODFELLAS, ironically playing-out like binge crime serials do now... with something to anticipate around every suspenseful corner... there's nothing to look forward to here except more and more conversations with De Niro on cruise control, and Pacino using a fake accent that's not only distracting but completely unnecessary.
Narrated by a slightly more aged than he's already aged De Niro, rock-skipping through short, uneven portions of the past, the tech-rendered faces look somewhat young but the bodies are as stiff as genuine old fogies: like watching Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford wearing a 1930's-era James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson mask...
Meanwhile, the continuous wrap-around section involves an afternoon drive with De Niro and Joe Pesci's powerful but overall pointless mobster Russell Bufalino, and there are a few new expository devices, perhaps to deviate from GOODFELLAS and CASINO: Like every mobster introduced with words flashing on the screen telling when and how they're eventually killed. It's not entirely clear why this happens other than to remind us who the movie's about, or that no one else actually matters...
And yet, backed by the usual Scorsese jukebox of vintage rock/soul tunes while peppered with rushed bouts of ultra-violence, we learn even less about the doomed union leader than in Danny DeVito's limp Jack Nicholson as HOFFA biopic: proof that the man's legacy has nothing to do with his story, because he obviously doesn't have one worth telling, or watching.