Unwatchable!

Rating: 1/10 (2 February 2007)

This is director Di Palma's big budgeted highly fictionalized account of Eliot Ness and his team going after Al Capone to get him convicted and sent to prison.Future bad movie king Kevin Costner is a bland and unconvincing Ness who shows not one wit of charisma in the role.Sean Connery is good-but not too convincing as the Irish American cop,and Andy Garcia-as the Italian American cop is probably the best thing this mess can give us. Di Niro as Capone seems to be doing a "Saturday Night Live" skit in a role that he was probably paid big bucks to do.The scene at the dinner when he makes those corny baseball analogies before caving in the skull of a fellow gangster with a baseball bat is thoroughly predictable and seems to be a leftover that never made its way into the equally bad "Scarface" a few years before this.This is not really a movie in the conventional sense. It plays more like a series of unrelated episodes strung together. It looks too clean, too perfect, kind of like a Hallmark greeting card.Di Palma-who practically made a career by ripping off Alfred Hitchcock eschews the Master this time and directly rips off the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein's Potemkin when the baby carriage with its over age passenger rolls down the steps of the railroad station in the highly stylized gun fight, a sequence that you see coming before it actually happens. There are corrupt juries, gun duels, knife fights and more classic cars than you can shake a stick at, but these elements do not an engrossing film make. The overall amateurish quality of this film sabotages it from the outset. All you can do is stare at-and hope to get something meaningful from it. Shame on you David Mamet for this screenplay! A total waste of time. As they say in Brooklyn.. Forgeddaboutit!