Gangster Squad (Ruben Fleischer)

[EyesWideOpen]

imdb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1321870/)

http://i213.photobucket.com/albums/cc261/gothamcentral79/gangster-squad-poster-has-a-b-movie-vibe-117331-1000-100_zps13e076ce.jpg

[Boner M]

This was hilariously awful; WTF EWO?

[TGM]

It wasn't awful. It was just very much okay.

[dreamdead]

I look at this poster and I think that it should be awesome; Stone might be a bit young for a femme fatale-like woman, but she totally has the vibe to do it right. And Gosling has an almost MacMurray blandness in the image that should work. That said, nothing about this remotely excites me to ever see it.

[Henry Gale]

This was like the polar opposite of a critic-proof release.

As long as I knew about, all the way up until the week of release, I was looking forward to it just fine (if only for the cast and being a fan of Fleischer's first two movie), and it seemed like everyone was in a similar boat whenever I'd see the trailer before something or I heard it brought up. But then the reviews started pouring in and every possibility for which angle I could see myself enjoying it was squashed, and suddenly everyone I knew similarly lost whatever interest they might've had to see it too.

Oh well, I guess to get my Gosling fill for the year I'll have to anticipate Only God Forgives, Place Beyond The Pines and whatever he's doing with Terrence Malick.

[EyesWideOpen]

I'm a pretty big Gosling fan and this was the worst acting I've ever seen out of him. Emma Stone is the sole redeeming factor.

[Kiusagi]

I'm a pretty big Gosling fan and this was the worst acting I've ever seen out of him. Emma Stone is the sole redeeming factor.

Yeah, is it just me or was his voice kinda annoying at times? It sounded more high pitched than usual or something.

[EyesWideOpen]

Yeah, is it just me or was his voice kinda annoying at times? It sounded more high pitched than usual or something.

Yep same here. It was high pitched and it just sounded off. It sounded way different then I've ever heard him.

[Sxottlan]

Not good. While I admire his attempt to try something different, everything seems to overwhelm the director. A contrived plot that pretty much remakes The Untouchables (i.e. the botched first raid) with the finale from Lethal Weapon thrown in for added measure. And throw in a bizarre Matrix-esque shootout when their film speeds up and slows down. I did like the shot of the bullet passing through a glass ornament.

We don't really care about any of the characters. Kind of surprised to see Sean Penn slumming through this. Any and all characters that are dead meat are horribly telegraphed well beforehand. I wanted more of the Robert Patrick character, obviously a man raised in the days of the Old West still working in post-war Los Angeles (we first meet him in a Mexican cantina naturally). I wanted to see a whole movie about him. I kept waiting for him to have a scene talking about his youth in the desert.

I will give the movie its due when it comes to its emergency edits in the wake of the theater shooting. I heard the theater shooting scene was the finale or near the finale of this movie, but it's been re-edited and I couldn't tell any noticeable gaps in the plot or felt anything was left hanging as a result.

Otherwise, a lazy effort.

[Acapelli]

Yeah, is it just me or was his voice kinda annoying at times? It sounded more high pitched than usual or something.
he sounds like mickey doyle from boardwalk empire

[number8]

He was mimicking the real guy's voice, I think. I read that Gosling talked to his character's grandchildren and incorporated the guy's tics into his performance, down to the way he flicked his cigarettes.

Side note: Gosling never uses his real voice in any of his movies.


LH: Ryan, you’re from Canada, but you seem distinctly American. You don’t have a Canadian accent.

Ryan Gosling: As a kid I decided that a Canadian accent doesn’t sound tough. I thought guys should sound like Marlon Brando. So now I have a phony accent that I can’t shake, so it’s not phony anymore. I’m going for the Madonna thing, the Lady Gaga thing—a phony accent that becomes your trademark.

[Skitch]

I enjoyed this flick. It's no groundbreaker, but I was entertained all the way through, and I'd watch it again. I'm not seeing all the hatred I read about in a few reviews. The negative reviews in this thread have been fair and far more thought out than the negative reviewers I've read elsewhere. Good brain, Match Cut. 6.5/10

[Henry Gale]

Sigh... This was just so bland and lifeless.

There isn't a person in this cast I don't like, I thought Ruben Fleischer's first two movies are incredibly fun and very re-watchable fare, and even when it doesn't seep into weird, liquid video mode, Dion Beebe's cinematography has a kind of an eerie, unique look to it (which may not actually fit the mood of the rest of it), and there are developments in the story that feel like they should be paving the way for engaging stuff, but despite all that, I just sat in front of Gangster Squad, desperately trying to grasp onto anything even remotely compelling or superficially exciting, but all I got was loud air.

The scenes just don't string together coherently, for the main crux of the plot, we hear people and places being talked about really quickly and we're immediately thrown straight to said variables, with tommy guns and explosions going off everywhere within a minute. Rinse and repeat. The characters all glide by on one character trait, despite a lot of the actors' performances quietely screaming to do something more with the material, but boy do we got variety! We got family man squad leader! Sensitive vixen! Guy who wants to get her away from that life! Another family man (providing the only moral questioning of this whole premise)! Rough n' tough sharpshooter! Black guy! Angry former boxer mob boss that's.. oh, that's Sean Penn as Mickey Cohen, he's supposed to be the central antagonist here isn't he?..... Shit. Also, pick and choose which of the above you'd like to hear bring up the war and how nothing's changed back home, because they basically all do so at some point. The script is really bad. Like, even if it was a case of tons of re-writes muddling something originally tightly constructed and well-structured, the basics of what's in between aren't much better.

If I was younger, and I hadn't really seen a lot of gangster movies, I could see myself stumbling onto this and think it was cool. I say this because the film almost seems to be focus group result of what a 12/13-year-old boy would want a gangster movie to be, despite still being R-rated and relatively stoic and adult. But the again, nowadays, I feel like there's even stronger video games set in this sort of heightened mob world that I could've already experienced to set a standard in my mind, whether or not I'd ever seen the movies they took influence from.

What I'm saying is, Gangster Squad doesn't succeed in any conceivable way, which is a shame, considering how so many of the right pieces were in place to make something even capably breezy. Just stick to comedies, Ruben.

*½ / D+

[Boner M]

2013's quintessential Movie That Exists.

[Winston*]

2013's quintessential Movie That Exists.

http://matchcut.artboiled.com/showthread.php?4335-Movies-that-exist&p=471990&viewfull=1#post471990

[Grouchy]

This was unbelievably shitty. Everything from the dialogue to the characters to the action scenes sucked... I'm surprised it got released the way it is. It's the type of Hollywood film that should bury careers, and yet it seems like it went down as just a cash brag from some otherwise good actors.

[plain]

remarkably dull and only worth watching for gosling's awful voice inflection.

[Robby P]

It's amazing how historically inaccurate this movie was. The entire third act is just preposterous.