Professionally Crafted Cop Thriller

Rating: 7/10 (16 April 2009)

None of the TV channels seem to rerun episodes of the superior 1960s series, "The Untouchables," with Robert Stack as Elliot Ness. If they did, no explanation of who the untouchables were would be necessary.
They were a small group of hand-picked agents from the Department of the Treasury, supposedly "untouchable" because they were shrimp pink and incorruptible. Their primary job was to battle Al Capone and, shortly after his being sent up the river, Frank Nitti in Chicago. The whole city was more than ordinarily corrupt during and after prohibition. After all, bootleg booze brought in a lot of money and, as Lord Acton should have said, money corrupts and absolute money corrupts absolutely.
Here we have Kevin Costner as the idealistic but naive Elliot Ness who recruits his honest first lieutenant, Sean Connery, whom he finds walking a beat on the Chicago streets. Connery is a crusty old battle horse. His advice to Kostner goes something like this: "If your enemy brings fists to a fight, you bring a knife. If he brings a knife, you bring a gun. If he brings a gun, you send him to the morgue." Curiously enough, this particular line has been taken up and used in current arguments about conflicts with nations like Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Seriously.
Connery helps Kostner get his act together. They hire an as-yet-untouched recruit from the police academy, Andy Garcia, and the team is sent an appointment from the Treasury Department, Charles Martin Smith, a pipe-smoking begoggled accountant seconded from Book Keeping who finds himself turned into a hero.
Al Capone is played in an operatic style by Robert DeNiro, who enacts a tactic for imposing his will that is borrowed from Nicholas Ray's "Party Girl." DeNiro is fine. He is apoplectic when Ness confronts him in a hotel lobby and challenges him to a fist fight.
The team is triumphant but the happy ending is tempered by the terrible losses. The plot and dialog are effective in capturing a particular, brutal sort of masculine world. The only family we see is Ness's and it's used to pump up the threat quotient. Hardly any friends exist outside the cohesive group itself. There's a recurring refrain -- "It's good to be married, right?" -- and we must accept that it is because Ness's family dynamics are flawless. None of the other three members of the team seem to have families.
With one notable exception, "Casualties of War," Brian De Palma's movies irritate me to a greater or lesser extent. Too much Hitchcock. At some point, "homage" must turn into "shameless rip off." Of course the suspenseful techniques work, otherwise Hitchcock wouldn't have become Hitchcock.
Yet, it's still distracting when we see a point-of-view shot of an assassin approaching Sean Connery's apartment. The camera peeks through the windows as it follows Connery along the hallway, but when the camera steps on a board and it makes a creaking sound, causing Connery to glance at the window, the camera quickly slides to the side and hides against the brick wall. In a long take, the camera (that is, let me repeat, the killer and the viewer) open a window, glide through, and examine each room in the apartment until it and we and he discover Connery and he turns and aims a shotgun at he, we, and it. Holy Saint Jude -- enough is enough!
That long and unprovoked point-of-view sequence would have been disdained by Hitchcock. The sources here are unquestionably the horror and slasher movies of the period, such as "Friday the Thirteenth." There is another long, largely slow-motion sequence at Union Station involving a baby carriage bouncing down the stairs. The director's sources are getting classier. This one is no less than Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potyemkin."
I'm having a little fun at the movie's expense but, as these things go, it's effectively done. A nicely put-together action thriller about a real historical group of tough cops who got the job done. If it's not entirely historically correct, so what? All stories of good and evil are partly fantasies. Relax and enjoy it.