Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are hot but barely believable in “Gangster Squad.” (Wilson Webb)
A great cast — headed by Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn and Emma Stone — is dressed to kill but shooting blanks in Ruben Fleischer’s “Gangster Squad,’’ a cartoonish 1940s shoot-’em-up that’s impossible to take seriously.
This flick is said to be based on a “true story” — from a well-researched book by Paul Lieberman (who, full disclosure, I worked with 30 years ago in New Jersey). But Fleischer and the credited screenwriter, Will Beall, play very fast and loose with the facts.
The true inspiration for “Gangster Squad’’ — like so many other period films these days — is actually other movies, principally Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables,’’ which was written by David Mamet. Unfortunately, Fleischer (“Zombieland’’) and Beall (a former LAPD detective-turned-novelist) take their material much less seriously than De Palma or Curtis Hanson (“L.A. Confidential’’).
The setting is 1949 Los Angeles — kudos to production designer Maher Ahmad and cinematographer Dion Beebe, though there are far too many images that have clearly been digitally tweaked to within an inch of their lives, as well as props and costumes that have obviously been freshly manufactured for the occasion.
The City of Angels has become a criminal empire ruled by Mickey Cohen (a heavily made-up Penn), a flamboyant former featherweight boxer-turned-Jewish-Mafioso from Brooklyn, and associate of the late Bugsy Siegel (and far better played by Harvey Keitel in Barry Levinson’s “Bugsy’’).
Cohen has put much of the LAPD and the city’s judiciary on his payroll as he prepared to corner the West Coast market on bookmaking and heroin. So Police Chief William Parker (a self-parodying Nick Nolte) sends for Sergeant John O’Mara (Brolin), an insubordinate but straight-arrow detective and World War II veteran who took it upon himself to bust up one of Cohen’s brothels.
O’Mara is tasked with recruiting a small squad of misfits to wage war on Cohen’s machine while ignoring such legal niceties as search and arrest warrants. His men include an expert in illegal wiretaps (Giovanni Ribisi) who frets the squad’s methods are not that different from Cohen’s, a retired sure-shot (Robert Patrick) and, improbably for an elite squad of the era, token black (Anthony Mackie) and Latino (Michael Pena) officers.
The most important, and reluctant (until his favorite shoeshine boy is snuffed by Cohen’s men) addition to the squad is Sergeant Jerry Wooters (Gosling) a smug, nattily dressed, skirt-chasing detective with military experience whose latest conquest is Cohen’s mistress, Grace Faraday (Stone).
You might reasonably ask why Wooters would accept an assignment that could very well land his part-time girlfriend in cement shoes, but this is the sort of movie in which such questions are cheerfully waved away. And where cops guarding a shot-up home somehow fail to notice survivors cowering in the bathtub.
Indeed, director Fleischer seems less interested in the Gangster Squad’s exploits as an opportunity to tell a coherent, involving story — he often allows (encourages?) his cast, especially Penn, to egregiously overact their wafer-thin characters and spout risible dialogue — than provide a jokey excuse for elaborate set pieces that make little narrative sense.
Like the opening scene where Penn — looking alarmingly like Al Pacino in Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy’’ — has a rival mobster chained to a pair of cars and pulled apart behind the famous Hollywoodland sign. (The last four letters were later removed.)
A shootout in a Hollywood hotel lobby is modeled on the train-station sequence in “The Untouchables,’’ but Fleischer lacks De Palma’s instincts for such subtleties as camera placement and editing, so it quickly devolves into tedium.
“The Gangster Squad’’ earned notoriety in July when its trailer showing a climactic shootout at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was pulled following the Aurora, Colo., movie-theater massacre.
The planned September opening was delayed so the offending sequence could be replaced with a newly shot ambush — that’s as gratuitously violent as it is nonsensical. And it’s in LA’s Chinatown, Jake.