Gangster Squad is all guns and no substance. It’s an overly stylized gangster picture that takes the Ocean’s 11 formula and applies it to an ultra-violent version of Dick Tracy. It’s slick looking, full of shootouts, and one-note characters. Basically, everything you’d expect from a January movie.
Even though the beginning of the film indicates that this movie is based on a true story, there’s nothing real-life about it. Everything that HBO’s Boardwalk Empire gets right about the gangster genre; Gangster Squad gets wrong. At no point does it attempt to dissect its varied characters. Instead the bad guys scowl and hate, while the good guys are driven by heroic bravado and we’re left to watch as they shoot it out in overly stylized slow-mo.
Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) is the classic all-American hero type. He’s bound by duty and responsibility and is appalled at the way gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) has taken over Los Angeles. O’Mara greets us with the standard voiceover narration to set the scene and his no nonsense character’s motivations. Cohen has become far too powerful though. His organized crime syndicate has grown rapidly. He now has judges, police chiefs, and patrolman on his payroll. He’s untouchable.
There are a few distinguished cops that can’t be bought though. The police chief, played by a hoarsely grizzled Nick Nolte, assigns O’Mara to take care of Cohen and his gang, “Off the books.” Meaning they won’t need police badges or warrants. It’s time to fight fire with fire, bullets with bullets.
Against the wishes of his pregnant wife, who is rightly afraid for his safety, O’Mara sets about putting together the ultimate team of cocky heroes to take down Cohen’s criminal empire. This is Ocean’s 11 all over again. A montage or two later, O’Mara has collected enough men with specific skills to take on Cohen.
Even though each character has their unique skillset, the movie still devolves into an unimaginative shooting gallery. Bad guys unload hundreds of rounds from their machine guns, rarely hitting anything except for unlucky inanimate objects which explode real good in the view of high-speed cameras. Instead the endless machine gun fire is slowed down, Matrix-style, for stylish effect. If I didn’t know any better I would’ve thought that this was Zack Snyder’s foray into the gangster genre.
The only worthwhile characters, Ryan Gosling’s Sgt. Jerry Wooters and Emma Stone’s Grace Faraday, get the short shrift as they’re overshadowed by Brolin’s machismo and Penn’s dastardliness. There isn’t an ounce of substance to any of the characters beyond shallow ideals. There’s never a reason to care about who lives and who dies. The bad guys stand across from the good guys and they both fire at each other. That’s it.
The shootouts are frenzied and video game-like. They lack any sort of coherent editing and geographical spacing to allow us to understand who is where in relationship to their enemies. Instead most of the action scenes are jumbled together bits of half-second edits, thrown together in a menagerie of blood-spattered images that are neither here nor there.
Maybe a bit of the movie’s blandness can be traced back to its extensive reshoots. The original version of the movie had already filmed a sequence where a theater full of innocent people is shot up by some of Cohen’s men. After the Aurora shooting, however, Warner Bros. ordered wide-ranging reshoots and script changes. The movie was then pushed back from its original release date, and probably never recovered.
Still, I have a hard time believing that even if it was left in its original state that it’d be any better. Certainly the characters would still be underdeveloped. It feels lazy and underdone. Each time the movie nears any sort of worthwhile character interaction it opts for shootouts instead of conversation. If the shoot’em up scenes were imaginatively constructed then maybe the movie would’ve held more promise, but they’re not. They’re just as bland as the rest.
