the untouchables revised and given a new treatment by Brian De Palma

Rating: 7/10 (11 November 2006)

"The Untouchables" is reckoned as one of the kingpins in Brian De Palma's filmography by the insiders and his devotees. I would tend to agree with them and to be conducive about this general contention with however certain reservations.
This transposition of the well-known TV series is surely one of his less personal works. His obsessions with Sir Alfred Hitchcock take a back seat and we're quite far from the thriller genre with grisly, bloody effects which helped to build the filmmaker's reputation. Actually, "the Untouchables" appears as formulaic in the presentation of events: Chicago during Prohibition under the control of the underworld with its main leader Al Capone, here acted by Robert De Niro whose performance is however less startling than in "Angel Heart" (1987) by Alan Parker, released the same year. A young fresh FBI agent Elliott Ness (Kevin Costner) rises up against him and has a yearning to make him fall. After a failed police raid in Capone's warehouses, he teams up with a seasoned cop, Malone (Sean Connery) and hires a band of volunteers who share his same determinations and then their hopes soar. But some members are killed including Malone. This doesn't help Ness's men to arrest Capone's accountant and his financial registers...
It's sure that De Palma wanted to remain as close as possible to the historic reality. It seems that everything in the film from the scenery to the making was recreated to capture the stifling atmosphere of the Prohibition and the spirit of the film noir in the thirties but the contents of the film is very classic as a whole. And it's often aggravated by a streak to excessive effects, one of De Palma's main drawbacks. Visual excesses which are mostly present in shoot-out and fight sequences like Malone's slow death. Ditto at another level for Ennio Morricone's majestic but overwhelming music. But once again and like in some De Palma's works, the rumbustious form compensates the contents despite bombastic tendencies. Three seminal sequences would deserve to be legion in the filmmaker's canon: the western sequence with the Canadian mounted police, Malone's death, the arrest of the accountant by Ness in a shoot-out sequence doubled with a wink to Eisenstein's masterpiece "the Battleship Potemkine" (1926).
It's rather acceptable stuff but I favor Phil Karlson's terse style on the same domain with "the Scarface Mob" (1959).