Nearly made to perfection and De Palma at his finest.

Rating: 9/10 (8 March 2001)

Updated version of the old tv series and based on the novel by Oscar Fraley, "The Untouchables" is fresh, smart, and "extremely" tense. The film's story follows Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner in his best role and perfermance), a Treasury officer who is sent from D.C. to Chicago during Prohibition to enforce the law and discovers after a raid that there's corruption in the city's police force. Ness begins the crackdown when he enlists the aid of three men: Jim Malone (Sean Connery), a Irish cop, a very raw and curious police recruit named George Stone (Andy Garcia), and Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), an accountant who Ness meets in his office. In that scene, Wallace tells Ness that one of the city's most notorious mobsters, Al Capone (played by Robert De Niro in an amusing yet in wicked fashion) has committed tax evasion. Besides that scene and the one where Ness and Malone are together in the church, the film never shows any serious signs of letting down. De Palma, who is also known for directing the classic bloodfest known as "Carrie", wisefully mixes in the sequences that either have action or Hitchcock-like suspense and squeezes in the ethinc conflict (Italians and Irish). Besides that, two lesser known actors, Billy Drago and Richard Bradford are good here as Capone's swift and vicious enforcer Frank Nitti and the police chief who tries to convince Malone to stay out of the battle between Ness and Capone. Screenwriter and Pulitzer-prize winner David Mamet wrote the maverlous script, Ennio Morricone conducts a priceless score, and Stephen H. Burum shows magnificant camera work. The movie is nearly made to perfection and shows De palma at his finest.