Gangster Squad Movie Review: Abundant in Violence, Lacking in Heart

Back in July, "Gangster Squad's" new trailer was introduced and it featured a sequence in which mobsters shot up a movie theater. Due to the Aurora shootings during a "Dark Knight Rises" screening, the trailer was pulled and the film was rewritten and re-edited to get rid of the aforementioned sequence. The film was delayed from its original launch window and pushed back to the start of 2013. "Gangster Squad", which includes an all-star cast headlined by Josh Brolin and Sean Penn, is now Hollywood's first major blockbuster, but people should think twice before really getting all excited.

At the center of the film's plot is Mickey Coen, a mobster who has a stranglehold on the city of Los Angeles. The LAPD decides to create a covert operation with a small group of officers that will wage war on Coen in hopes of taking down his empire. The squad is headlined by the film's protagonist John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) and also includes a lazy cop Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) and Navidad Ramirez (Michael Peña). As might be expected the film offers plenty of violence, some of it of the excessive kind. As the movie opens, we see Coen ready to kill one of his enemies. He has the man's arms and legs tied to two separate cars that would essentially rip his body in half; you better believe that that is exactly what is going to happen. O'Mara's introduction is also one of violence as he runs into one of Coen's locales and takes down three men to save a girl. Director Ruben Fleischer and his sound mixing team were clearly intent on making the most out of the violence and make every punch deafeningly loud.

The film's style is erratic at best. One moment, Fleischer plays the violence with raw grittiness and then decides to go for a comic book feel in the following action sequence and freeze frames a couple of action shots. In the climactic scene we are subjected to that clichéd bullet-time slow motion that feels unnecessary and gratuitous. It is almost as if the director did not have any real confidence in which style he wanted to portray the violence and decided to embrace them all.

The screenplay by Will Beall and Paul Lieberman is unfortunately uninspired and riddled with Hollywood tropes. The film opens with a monologue by O'Mara talking about badges and honor. It's an altruistic thought, but almost feels didactic in its substance and when the mechanism comes back to end the film, it almost feels like the writers are trying too hard to give the film a moral focus that was otherwise missing in its entirety. The writers are more focused on coming up with fancy one-liners (many of which don't actually work) instead of developing characters and their material runs so thin in the third act that they resort to improbabilities and incoherent plot twists to end the story.

Josh Brolin leads the charge as O'Mara, a man caught between his private and professional duties. We are told that he was a hero in World War II and his entire basis for spiting his wife's pleas that he not put himself in danger is some altruistic ideal. While certainly admirable from an abstract perspective, it is hard not to ask why O'Mara would make his wife suffer; especially knowing she is expecting his child. In a way, it makes him selfish. Unfortunately, this potential conflict and complexity is taken for granted and the idea of creating a strong conflict within O'Mara's household is conveniently abandoned moments after it gets going. Brolin brings a cool edge and nobility to the character, but thanks to the weak script, is unable to reconcile any of the holes in this character's development.

Ryan Gosling brings his typical candor and charisma. His character Jerry starts off accepting the corrupt reality of Los Angeles, but his turn against the crime comes as a result of personal tragedy and represents the one believable plot thread in the entire film.

Sean Penn is a one-dimensional villain as Mickey Coen. We are told of his rising from poverty and his harsh history as a boxer, but the only character visible on screen is a repulsive monster that spends most of his time coming up with a new variation for saying what ultimately amounts to "I own this town."

Emma Stone is well known for playing strong women throughout her career. Her character in "The Help" fought against established racial attitude while even her turn in the new "Spiderman" movie represented an intelligent girl that takes action when called upon. However, this is not the case in "Gangster Squad" as her character Grace is nothing more than a damsel in distress. She winds up being a key plot device late in the story, but otherwise serves to give Ryan Gosling's Jerry motivation. The rest of the cast give serviceable performances, but do little to elevate their characters beyond caricatures.

"Gangster Squad" ultimately offers up some thrills and will likely appeal to those who enjoy intense violence and the occasional joke. For those looking for an articulate character study or top end crime drama, this film will likely prove unsatisfying and tiresome.