So this is January. That time of year when Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with a bad film, so they release it now. It’s an interesting thing about this film. It was originally showing the stars of the film holding weapons and gunning down the audience as part of it’s Publicity. Fortunately, they pulled that idea. It’s just a shame they didn’t pull the entire movie off the big screen as well.
Inspired by true stories, and that’s the problem, the story is a group of vignettes all crafted together (and I use the word crafted loosely) to deliver the world behind Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) who was the King of Hollywood crime lords in 1949. Josh Brolin plays the cop who wants to take Mickey down (trouble is having met Brolin in my own real life and knowing what he’s really like a very intimate setting amongst peers – I can’t help but see him as the new Tommy Lee Jones who lost his career due to arrogance.) Ryan Gosling, however, is refreshing as
always, the kid on the good side, and the love of Grace (Emma Stone) who happens to be Cohen’s etiquette tutor, among other things.
The plot is that this cartoonish magnificent-seven decide to end all crime in the City of Angels (a stray cast of others including Nick Nolte as the LAPD Chief. The problem is – and there’s a lot of problems – the story feels disjointed, the violence so over the top it’s never
earned. It becomes polarizing. We don’t care about these people because we hardly know them. And given our recent state of America do we really need that kind of unnecessary violence?
But the biggest crime of all is the lame dialog probably because the writer (William Beal) is a former L.A. Homicide detective and while he knows the law, he doesn’t know words. Sentences that are so stale – “He’s a bull in a china shop” or Emma Stone pleading “I don’t want out of this town I want out of this life!” What life? We know nothing about you. Her character is as one-dimensional as a cartoon. What is this movie trying to be? One can’t be sure but they shouldn’t dare to breathe L A Confidential in the same breath. I am sure of one question that could have solved everything: Where is Dick Tracy when you really need him? ♛