Flawed Potential

Rating: 6/10 (28 September 2004)

In any sensible scheme of things The Untouchables is not a Great Movie - but it somehow does attract serious attention. We want it to be a good movie - it has a big name crew and Serious Intent written all over it - but it fails. It doesn't fail badly - it fails in small, sad ways that in themselves are hardly noticeable, but which in the end just mount up to an unsatisfactory experience. De Palma wants to be a better director than he is - he uses intentionally "interesting" camera angles and movement. And just sometimes he can make a powerful sequence like the shoot out in the railway station. That the very effective minimalistic approach to this sequence came about through budget cut restraints, and that he borrowed heavily from Hitchcock, doesn't take anything away from the scene's effectiveness - though it does take away from any claims to De Palma's ability as a director. De Palma's wannabe serious pretensions drag this movie down and hold it from ever taking off into the thrilling action picture it wants to be. Mamet's script holds potential - it is a dark and somber script. When given to an actor with presence, such as Sean Connery, the dour, mean, repressed and aggressive nature of prohibition Chicago is fully explored. But the script is flawed. The sequence in Canada should never have been shot. The characters could have been better drawn and given more life and, well, character. But there was potential there that a good director would have exploited. Costner is wooden. De Niro is limited. Garcia says little. And Martin Smith is ugly in big glasses. It is only Connery and Bradford who do well. The set design gives everything a comic book feel. But not on the dark Gothic scale of Batman - no, this is more like Doonesbury. Take little snippets here and there, give it a fast edit with lots of Sean Connery, and you have a great trailer. But sadly the movie does not live up to expectation.