Henry O'Brien
Robert De Niro might need to permanently cut ties with director Barry Levinson after The Alto Knights. Only professionally, of course. They can obviously still be friends. The two made successful films from Sleepers and Wag the Dog, but have since made putrid filth like What Just Happened? and the TV film The Wizard of Lies.
Their latest collaboration, The Alto Knights, tells the story of mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello in the 1950s and feels so ridiculously worn out that it’s genuinely astounding that it got made to begin with. To be fair, the film features all the people who made such legendary crime dramas of the past quarter-century in De Niro, Levinson and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi. We even get double trouble with De Niro, who plays both Genovese and Costello, and heavy prosthetics to de-age him.
But calling Levinson and De Niro’s latest collaboration contrived would be too kind. It instead feels like a husk of a Goodfellas knock-off that should’ve been made three decades ago. Indeed, the movie has been in the works since the 1970s and it’s honestly a shame because the final product makes one wonder why it was even made in the first place.
The film opens with Costello being the victim of a hit ordered by Genovese. Any suspense or tension we were supposed to get out of Costello’s attack immediately gets sucked into a broken-down vaccum once Costello starts giving a long-narration about how he and Genovese grew up together.
The narration continues periodically throughout the rest of the film and serves as the most egregious ripoff of Martin Scorsese. Scorsese and De Niro just made another epic Italian crime drama, The Irishman, not even a decade ago. But that late-stage Scorsese masterwork examines the genre and what it’s like to be at the end of one’s life.
The Alto Knights, like many of the pale imitations of Scorsese crime dramas, does not feature any such introspection. Along with narration, the riffing of Scorsese continues with needle drops of doo-wop songs as Costello continues to narrate the mob’s decline and a CNN’s The Fifties-esque narrative of mid-20th century America. All of these elements are supposed to remind you of better films and do absolutely nothing else.
In fairness, all these stale callbacks are partially the only reason to keep watching, because the dramatic tension that defines The Alto Knights again feels tired. Genovese and Costello grew up together, but before their distinct personalities created irreconcilable differences. Once Genovese had to flee the country to hide out in Italy, Costello took over as the boss of all bosses. But now that Genovese has returned, he wants his power back.
Pileggi’s script features way less of the nuances and subtleties that made his Scorsese collaborations — Goodfellas and Casino — so engaging and rewatchable. In this work with Levinson, there are lines that bluntly display the differences between the two mob bosses, like when Genovese tries to remind Costello where he’s from, dissuading him from becoming legitimate after a life of crime. The silent gestures between mobsters that indicate danger or betrayal make an appearance, which makes the film have the cinematic experience of listening to an audiobook.
Many of the gangster dramas that are in the official canon—the first two Godfather films and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America—have dissected these themes of brotherhood under strife or the evolving structures of power. Look further, and recall that Genovese’s exile to Italy was one of the key story-shifting moments in Francis Ford Coppola’s first Godfather movie. Sure, you can argue that since The Alto Knights is based on some of the most important American gangsters and their stories, it’s alright for the film to be because the great gangster films we love come from kernels of actual Mafia accounts.
But with such massively important figures in mob history, like Vincent “The Chin” Gigante (Cosmo Jarvis), the film fails in fully heightening the importance of anyone on screen. The politicians, mob bosses and henchmen who made up this history feel so forgettable in The Alto Knights. That’s not even mentioning Debra Messing as Costello’s wife, Bobbie, who gets little screentime and feels as hollow as the rest of the characters.
To his credit, Robert De Niro attempts to provide a bit of a spark as both Costello and Genovese. Costello is the silent, powerful type, but De Niro clearly has more fun as the snappier and more combustible Genovese. There are clear limitations with how fiery De Niro can get since he’s now an octogenarian, but he at least gets to be a little wry and coy as Genovese. Although having one our greatest living actors be on screen twice can feel like a thrill, the act of watching De Niro in this film is as rewarding as some crappy painting or picture of movies’ greatest gangsters.
For all the seriousness The Alto Knights attempts to project on screen, its most entertaining and original moments are when the cops start to close in on the Mafia. In a scene where a crowd of portly Italian gangsters start running away in a countryside field to their cars once they hear sirens, the film finds a level of parody that could’ve made for a much more complex and fascinating picture.
