A mob boss would have a hit out for someone about this. Robert De Niro’s new gangster picture, The Alto Knights, bombed at the box office during its opening weekend. It pulled in just over $3 million domestically on a $45 million budget.
The Warner Bros. film had the proper pedigree in spades. Nicholas Pileggi wrote the screenplay. It’s the latest in his list of acclaimed mob movie credits, starting with Goodfellas, for which he was nominated for an Oscar and won the BAFTA for best screenplay. Then there’s Casino, The Irishman and even American Gangster.
This is the fourth collaboration between director Barry Levinson and De Niro, but it’s just too much De Niro in this film.
In this story based on real-life Mafia history set in 1950s New York, he plays both rival gangsters, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese– the latter with the help of hours of prosthetics. The role cried out for Joe Pesci to play it.
De Niro is clearly and undeniably one of the most riveting actors who’s ever played a gangster on screen in the last 50 years, in some of the best mob movies of all time, starting with his storied role in the Godfather Part II.
You might even call him the Godfather of Mafia movies. So you’re rooting for this to be another in that great canon, and it has such potential– but falls flat after the dramatic opening scene of an attempted hit on Costello in the lobby of his Upper West Side apartment building as an elevator descends.
As Costello, he narrates the story of how his boyhood buddy Genovese came to crave his demise and take over the New York streets as kingpin. All the while, Costello manipulates everyone around him including his wife Bobbie (played by Debra Messing) to protect himself and then leave it all behind, preferably in Italy.
The maneuvers are fascinating, especially when it comes to Costello playing the other bosses and some of Genovese’s closest associates.
The iconography of 1950s New York is stunning, including the glamorous restaurants and nightclubs that are the milieu of the mobsters. The cars and the costumes are equally fabulous.
There’s also an entertaining subplot about Genovese’s marriage and its meltdown. And of course, there’s murder – lots of it.
But it’s not enough to propel The Alto Knights into the top tier of the best gangster films of all time, or anywhere close to it.
