Arts & Culture

What: The Alto Knights
Where: In theatres
What: Movie, 123 mins.
When: Fri., March 21
Genre: Crime, Drama
Rating: NN (out of 5)
Why You Should Watch: De Niro’s long, tangential outbursts inject humour and vigour into an otherwise lifeless film.

A DOUBLE DOSE of Robert De Niro is not enough to salvage a mobster flick that has more in common with a hokey soap opera than a gritty crime fable. Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights is an emphatically uncinematic endeavour, solely banking on our collective familiarity with mafia movies and shows — and its leading star’s long-cherished association with the subgenre — to get its palms on the big score. But it lacks the stylistic flair and personality necessary to imbue its “based on true events” story with scope, scale and vitality.
As it stands, Levinson’s would-be gangland epic not only squanders a sweeping, decade-spanning tale of competing mobsters but also two Robert De Niro performances.

First conceived as a project dubbed Wise Guys in the 1970s, The Alto Knights arrives as the amalgamation of all the tropes and cliches that have come to define the genre in the decades since, offering little else but era-appropriate costuming, needle drops and vernacular to fill in the gaps left by its flaccid filmmaking. It’s a quality wholly at odds with Levinson’s acclaimed body of work, which is defined by sturdy, handsomely made crowd-pleasers like Rain Man and Wag the Dog.

In its most memorable moments, The Alto Knights unfolds like scrappy sketch comedy, boasting light chuckles and exaggerated personas that faintly call back to the spirit of much more engrossing works. However, even these sequences blur the line between laughing with and laughing at the movie.

In the story penned by Nicholas Pileggi (a genre veteran who co-wrote GoodFellas and its non-fiction source text Wiseguy), De Niro stars as real-life mob bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese as they vie for control of New York City. Taking its name from the infamous Manhattan social club, The Alto Knights traces the initial friendship and falling out between the two mafiosos as they lead to a violent, grand reshaping of the syndicate’s power structure. Drenched in sloppy monochrome, the flashbacks that detail the rise of Costello and Genovese in the roaring ’20s feature fourth-wall-breaking narration that’s lazily plucked from films like GoodFellas and The Irishman — replete with an aged De Niro speaking directly into the lens.

Such tired, derivative choices define The Alto Knights, which feels fused from the weakest elements of its direct and obvious influences. The faux-interview framing device doubles as a clumsy storytelling crutch, often telling us the two principal gangsters share a deep fraternal connection without ever pausing to visually depict what is the entire emotional basis of the film. It’s a quality that extends to the shoddy, haphazard direction. Levinson and cinematographer Dante Spinotti’s camerawork is defined by flat framing, full of visual motifs and elements that are abandoned and suddenly reassumed ad nauseum. Spinotti, who famously lensed crime epics like Heat and L.A. Confidential, labours to foster the same sense of texture and grandeur — often reduced to the same sluggishly staged wides and close-ups.

Jarring digital zoom-ins and shaky cams manifest as trite attempts to give thrust to a story as inert as the lens capturing it. The decision to intercut a mob hit with Raoul Walsh’s seminal White Heat invites unflattering comparisons the film simply can’t handle.

Levinson’s approach to De Niro’s two-fold role is equally repetitive and lackadaisical, consisting of the same split-screen staging and over-the-shoulder framing across its 123-minute runtime. It not only hints at a film desperately in need of reshoots but one whose entire casting gimmick feels like an afterthought — a snappy sellable pitch with little care paid to its thematic merit.

In a career defined by nuanced, subtly affecting roles, De Niro’s stature within the mob movie canon is rendered a caricature in Levinson’s film. De Niro struggles to find two unique registers, with both Costello and Genovese defined by the same stuttering, grumbling inflections. Save for the goofy facial prosthetics, it would be a Sisyphean task to tell the two protagonists apart. Where The Irishman served as a definitive exclamation point, De Niro’s work in The Alto Knights acts as a clunky, woefully disinterested postscript.

The Sopranos alums Kathrine Narducci, as Genovese’s wife, and Michael Rispoli, as a high-ranking boss closely allied with Costello, try their best to round out the cast with colour. At the same time, Debra Messing disappears into the background, operating more as set-dressing than Costello’s wife. Cosmo Jarvis’s bumbling hitman is a rare, comedic bright spot in a mostly drab experience.

For a film purportedly more than five decades in the making, The Alto Knights feels like a rushed and underbaked first draft. No number of mob whackings and slang-filled tirades can hide how criminally boring it all is.