Film Review: The Alto Knights

Welcome back to the blog readers. There are not many film genres that intrigue me more than crime drama. You obviously have the big ones like the Godfather trilogy (1972-90) and Goodfellas (1991), but there have been some pretty decent ones over the years like The Irishman (2019), The Departed (2005), and Heat (1995). Would this film be able to join the ranks of those classics or would it be sleeping with the fishes? Stick around to find out.

The Alto Knights was directed by Barry Levinson from a script by Nicholas Pileggi. The film stars Robert de Niro playing both Frank Costello and Vito Genevese, with Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis, Katherine Narducci, and Michael Rispoli in supporting roles. The film highlights the past of Costello and Genevese, in which they were close friends, and their present, in which Genovese orchestrates the assassination of Costello and Costello retaliates by destroying the empire he has built.

I actually had a bit of optimism for this film because the trailer threw me back to films like The Irishman and the Godfather films, but the main attraction for me was always going to be Robert de Niro. He knows how to play these larger-than-life figures and he does it well. But I have to rain on the parade and say the two characters he plays in this film are anything but larger-than-life. I could say the same for this film as a whole. The film is boring, written poorly, paced horribly, and de Niro's performance falls on borderline comical at points.

I want to start by talking about the dual performance of Robert de Niro as both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. As Costello, de Niro basically plays the same character he played in The Irishman, but a lot worse, especially because he is the central narrator of the film. I found Costello to be formulaic and generic with no real meat on the bones, and it suffers through. And as Genovese, he admittedly gets to play it a little more comedic at times but the act gets old really quick. I can see him having fun with the role, but I quickly got tired of the over-the-top comedy. Basically, what I am trying to say is that he DID NOT NEED TO PLAY BOTH CHARACTERS.

Listen, I cannot even beat around the bush on this at all. The script for this film absolutely fucking sucks. I literally could not stand any of the dialogue that was coming out of any of the actors' mouths. The writing was so bad, it felt like de Niro wasn't even de Niro. The writing was so bad that it literally felt like I was hearing words written by a 12-year-old that is writing a script for him and his friends pretending to be in a gangster film. Mind you, the film was written by a man who just turned 92 FUCKING YEARS OLD, who has not written a film since 2007 and is only his fourth writing credit since 1990's Goodfellas. There was one interaction between de Niro's characters that literally made me want to kill myself. I could not believe I was hearing this come out of his mouth. "You can't do this because it's going to be really bad for you, and then it will be really bad for me, and then it will be really bad for everybody." I'm paraphrasing, but that's what it sounded like.

Before I let you go, I need to talk about the pacing of this film, because I think this is the worst-paced film I have ever seen in my life. Not the worst film, that is still reserved for Meg 2: The Trench (2023). Hear this, the runtime of this film is 2 hours and 3 minutes. 45 minutes in, I felt like I was in that theater for an hour and a half. And no, it was not because of the 28 minutes of ads that played before the film. At that point, I seriously felt like walking out of the theater because we were rolling at a snail's pace. By the time the film was over, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief because it was finally over.

In conclusion, The Alto Knights is a soulless and lifeless portrayal of two of the most legendary crime bosses' feud that overstays its welcome for far too long. Thank you all for reading, and I will see you for the next post.