The Unexpected Movie Review Project, Pt. III: Gangster Squad

Overall: 3/4
          Acting: 3/4
          Cinematography: 4/4
          Production Design: 4/4
          Costume/Makeup: 4/4
          Tech: 2/4
          Music/Score: 3/4
          Pacing: 4/4
          Script: 3/4


I will admit that I had really low expectations going into this movie, since I'd heard that it was super, ultra violent, and I am not into violence for violence's sake -- okay, that's a lie, I'm not into gore for gore's sake -- when I go into a film. I'd originally wanted to do Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, but circumstance landed me at a theatre where that wasn't playing, so me and a couple of friends got tickets for Gangster Squad instead. I rationalized it as wanting a break from award-show-bait movies.

I have to say I was more than pleasantly surprised.


The film is very violent -- it opens with a man being drawn and quartered and then eaten by wolves, for God's sakes! -- but it is also a very well-rendered, tightly-told Hero's Journey, with the main character's character being such a journey beat-for-beat, from the Call to Action to the man-to-man confrontation between him and the story's primary antagonist.

Sgt. John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) is a maverick city cop in Los Angeles, not particularly concerned with keeping his perps alive when the justice system is too corrupt to keep them behind bars.  He's married, and his wife is concerned about his reckless behavior, telling him that she didn't wait for him throughout the war (WWII; this movie is set 1949) only to lose him now.  But he receives the Call in the form of his boss -- who tells him to put together a specialized, off-the-books squad of cops like O'Mara to take down crime boss Mickey Cohen.

While this is the main plot, and plays out as you'd expect, there's also a great cast of supporting characters, whose stories don't just serve to further O'Mara's.  Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone play, respectively, Sgt. Jerry Wooters (a somewhat reluctant member of O'Mara's squad) and Grace Faraday (Cohen's etiquette teacher and current squeeze), and their romance forms a major subplot to the movie.  Grace winds up being pivotal to the legal aspect of their case, too, which thankfully elevates her from the place of "love interest/femme fatale" occupied by so many other female characters in the noir genre.

Also refreshing is the characterisation of O'Mara's pregnant wife, Connie.  Connie is the one responsible for choosing the men for the squad out of the files O'Mara brings home to her.  She is instrumental to the formation of the Gangster Squad, and so, behind the scenes, the taking down of Mickey Cohen.

Speaking of Mickey Cohen, I can only say that Sean Penn excellently plays out a villain who while understandable, is not sympathetic.  At some points, he seems larger than life, but it's exactly where it needs to be, and his fight at the end with O'Mara was excellently choreographed.

As for the technical aspects of the film, the score was gorgeous.  It fit the noir feel beautifully, as did the cinematography -- even though there is a certain over-reliance on slow-mo and speed-up techniques during important fight scenes that can be bothersome to some.

I have to trigger warn for anyone who wants to see this film, because the first sequence of the movie includes an attempted gang rape of a young woman.  She is rescued just in time by the hero, but the scene is...disturbing at the very least.

Overall, this is very much a genre film, but it's an excellent example of its genre.  It's not as good as, say, L.A. Confidential, but it's still very good -- it treats its female characters better than most (aside from the woman rescued in the beginning, who never shows up again), and it's a very well-plotted Hero's Journey, so I have no huge complaints to make about it.