Not Really Cinema at All

Rating: 5/10 (28 December 2019)

Ironic how Martin Scorsese recently critiqued comic book movies for not being "cinema" because they do not "convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being" (1), while he himself is fresh off the release of "The Irishman," which does none of what he thinks cinema is really about (2).
"The Irishman" is an interminable 3.5-hour film whose main focus is a mouthbreathing Robert De Niro with an immutable on-screen frown (which is actually a good fit for a character with "the emotional range of a teaspoon" (3)) whose character is a crook through and through from beginning to end: with no tangible "emotional, psychological experiences" worth the mention. And the same applies to the whole cast of characters who populate this film, all of them singularly unsympathetic (and this includes the superficial non-gangster characters as well). The only semblance of emotional tension in the entire film is at the very end when De Niro's character questions one of her adult daughters about the emotional toll his life as a gangster may have had on his family. Yet even that brief scene fails to deliver anything of substance so what you're ultimately left with is a movie that disappoints on all fronts, with the possible exceptions of cinematography (and even this aspect was subpar for a Scorsese film), the score, and Joe Pesci's portrayal of a person who has had a stroke. If Wikipedia is anything to go by, then there even was a factual error shown on screen regarding the year when one of the characters was murdered in real life.
"The Irishman" is a two-bit remake of "Goodfellas" with none of the character and barely any of the style that made "Goodfellas" such an enjoyable cinematic experience. Recent comic book films that I have seen have almost wholly been trash ("Logan" was pretty good though) but somehow Scorsese has managed to piece together a film that is even a bigger waste of time and effort for anybody that actually shares Scorsese's own infatuation for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Fuller, Don Siegel, Ingmar Bergman and the rest, and his appreciation of classic, quality filmmaking (2). Scorsese can wax eloquent about cinematic auteurs all he wants but "The Irishman" goes to show that simply having good taste does not inoculate against bad judgment and bad directing.