Alto Knights: A Review - Monstrous Mess of a Mob Movie

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Whoo-boy…this is a massive mess of a movie.

Alto Knights, which stars Robert DeNiro in dual roles as mobsters Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, chronicles the troubled relationship between those two gangster big wigs.

The film, which boasts a bevy of big-name talent besides DeNiro – including Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson and Oscar-nominated writer Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas), hit theatres on March 21st and bombed at the box office (it made $9 million on a $50 million budget). It is now available to stream on MAX, where I just watched it.

Alto Knights is an extraordinary piece of cinema if only becomes it is so incoherent and dramatically impotent.

The film, written by acclaimed scribe Nicholas Pileggi, feels less like a narrative arc than a collection of mismatched scenes pasted together like a kindergartener’s art class collage.

The film meanders from nothing to nothing with no dramatic stakes until it reaches a non-crescendo with a flaccid non-ending that is so odd and dull it felt like everyone just stopped showing up to work on the film one day and they decided to call it quits and let the editors try and figure out how to make it a full story.

To give some context, the final sequence/shot of this film is so bad and so poorly done it is actually shocking. Although I guess since it involves nothing more than an old man wandering around aimlessly it is fitting for this disastrous movie. (Not to mention that the sequence is cut to too quickly and cut away from even more quickly…so bizarre!!)

The film is meant to dramatize the often-tumultuous relationship between the fiery Vito Genovese and the calm Frank Costello, two major players in the mafia in the 1950’s and 60’s. The selling point of the film is that DeNiro plays both characters...much like Michael B Jordan plays the twins in Sinners. This construct actually works because DeNiro does very solid work as both Genovese and Costello, and unlike Jordan, gives both characters distinct traits and personalities and you never mix them up.

That DeNiro would do solid work is somewhat surprising considering his obvious struggles to give a shit in the latter part of his career, but that his performance would be absolutely wasted in this steaming garbage pile is a tragedy.

One can only assume that the responsibility for this mess lays squarely on the shoulders of once-esteemed director Barry Levinson. Levinson, who won the Best Director Oscar for Rain Man, was at one time one of the heavyweight auteurs in American cinema…but that time has long since passed.

A brief glance at Levinson’s filmography reveals a stunning-amount of terrific films at the start…films like Diner (1982), The Natural (1984) - my favorite baseball movie of all-time, Tin Men (1987), Good Morning Vietnam (1987) and his Oscar winner Rain Man (1988).

Then in 1991 Levinson made Bugsy starring Warren Beatty and Annette Benning. Bugsy was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but people with eyes to see (people like me) could see something had shifted. Bugsy is a bad movie – and similar to Alto Knights, it is dramatically incoherent and feels frantically stitched together by underpaid and under-appreciated editors desperate to find some coherence in a sea of nonsense.

After Bugsy, Levinson’s filmography takes a disastrous turn from relevancy into the dark void of the instantly forgettable. Toys, Jimmy Hollywood, Disclosure and Sleepers are all surprisingly second-and-third-rate films.

In 1997 Levinson has a bit of a comeback with Wag the Dog, a clever and decent enough film but one that isn’t nearly as good as it was claimed to be.

After Wag the Dog the wheels really come off the Levinson wagon and he makes a string of some ten entirely worthless movies over a nearly twenty-year span that thrust into the deepest depths of irrelevancy.

And now, at the age of 83, he once again has a big budget and movie star and he’s reaching for the brass ring one more time and he falls flat on his face.

It would seem highly unlikely that Levinson, at his age and with this level of failure artistically and financially on Alto Knights, would be allowed back into the arena and given money to make a movie again. In a sense that is sad…he seems like a nice guy and he did make some quality movies early in his career…but this is life…if you make shit for long enough, people will realize you can now only make shit…for proof of this theory look no further than Alto Knights.

As for Alto Knights, what is so frustrating about the film is that it could have, maybe even should have, been a really good movie. There is a terrific story at its core about Genovese and Costello, and DeNiro really does do quality work in the film, but it is all scuttled by some really poor storytelling and structure.

It also doesn’t help when disastrous casting decisions are made where Debra Messing is given a major role. Messing is so bad in this movie it actually made me uncomfortable and I felt bad for her. The same is true for Cosmo Jarvis, who comically contorts himself to such extremes in order to look like Vincente Gigante I worried he might give himself a stroke.

Ultimately, the problem with Alto Knights is that it is so poorly structured that it neuters itself dramatically by failing to have a climax or a clear and definitive ending. It just walks off into the sunset whistling to itself like a dementia-addled, elderly gangster in his pajamas being led off to a state-run nursing home with bars on the windows.

I suppose Alto Nights greatest accomplishment is having an awful lot of big-name talent attached to it, yet still managing to be nothing but awful.

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