Gangster Squad

Jmac:

I went into this movie thinking that I would just be ok with it and have to tolerate Sean Penn. Well I was totally wrong. Although Sean Penn is billed as one of the main actors, and his presence is still onscreen plenty he is not the main character nor one of the more occurring characters. So that was a plus for me because I really really don't like him, and he generally brings movies down in my opinion. The rest of the cast Josh Brolin, Emma Stone, Giovanni Ribisi, Ryan Gosling and the others that are all very familiar faces, all do a wonderful job.

The plot centers around the Gangster Squad which is formed from guys from different police units that were not exactly golden boys and didn't mind getting their hands dirty if it meant bringing down a greater evil. That greater evil being Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) who ran LA mob operations for several years in the in the 40s and 50s after Bugsy Siegel was assassinated. I love this period in American history where anything seemed possible, as we were high from winning our second world war, and the Soviets still had not developed the Bomb. It was a time when the Mafia flourished and basically built Las Vegas from a small dam town into the city it is today. Mickey Cohen has always fascinated me as well, and was one of the things that drew me to the movie, because he worked with the mob in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. Being part of the Jewish mafia truly was to be part of country spanning organization.  

While movie takes literary license with fact and fiction surrounding LA during those years there was a real ‘gangster squad’ and they were after Mickey Cohen, but they used their brains more than bullets. This is why Cohen was sent to prison for tax fraud and not murder, like many other famous gangsters, tax fraud is far easier to pin on someone like that than murder.

I would have watched a movie or even a documentary about the ‘gangster squad’ even if it had not been hollywood-ized, but with the short attention spans of today's spastic audiences you sort of have to blow something up or have a fight scene every twenty minutes or so. Which this movie does, but not so much that its a Michael Bay Transformers where you think your TV will literally explode if there is one more action sequence... don't get me wrong I like Transformers but it does get to be a bit much at times.

Well this movie has it all, scenic locations from around LA, beautiful dames in stunning gowns, that 50s accent that got passed down from the 30s like ‘ehhh copper, see, see now copper ya can't get me see’, oh and the cars, that is how an automobile is supposed to look, not the rounded packards, which are nice but the black and white convertible which for some reason my googling powers can not find was beautiful.

I give the movie 4.2 shotgun butts to the face out of 5. 

Why they picked Ryan Gosling for a part that was already played by Aaron Staton (Ken Cosgrove from Mad Men) in LA Noire is beyond me.