Gangs of New York 2002
I didn’t think much of this movie, but the DVD is one of the best looking I’ve seen yet on my still fairly new HDTV. It really showed just how good a picture can look on a home TV.
A lot of the previews were taken from the first 15 minutes or the last 15 minutes. That tells me that there was a whole lot of filler in between in this nearly 3-hour movie. One problem was that, because the movie is long, I kept getting interrupted and it took me two nights to watch the whole thing and that has to hurt the experience.
But the movie just seemed very empty. In one scene people walk up to each other and talk even though they are bitter enemies and then later the same person might just throw a knife and kill their enemy. Or shoot them. Or whatever. Is there some code I’m missing of when it’s okay to kill your enemy and when it isn’t? That really bothered me.
Daniel Day-Lewis played Bill the Butcher really well. It’s a bizarre character, made worse by terrible hair (on top, sideburns, mustache; all horrible hair) and a crazy Irish-New York accent that I kind of liked. The rest of the characters were just okay. Nobody really stood out including Leonardo and Cameron Diaz.
As a big expensive movie it is worth watching if you think you might be interested. You get introduced to some interesting historical tidbits. You see Irish walking off of “the boat", getting citizenship, signing up for the army and being shipped out to go fight and die in the civil war as soon as they arrive. You see rival volunteer fire fighting squads getting in a brawl while the house they came to save burns to the ground. And you see how Tamany Hall operated and the transition between feudal warlords running New York through fear to more accountable politicians running it by being popular and working the political machine in order to get votes. But these are just tidbits and have very little to do with the story.
And I think that was where the movie got into trouble. It couldn’t make up its mind about whether it wanted to be a historical depiction of life in the 1860’s or whether it wanted to be a story about two rivals that just happens to be set in the 1860’s. Even that story is weak. We never see Leonardo as anything near the leader or fighter that Bill is. Leonardo seems to like Bill or at least learn to respect him, but then he still feels a need to kill him (but not before saving his life!). I just wasn’t real impressed with this story. And the violence seemed to be completely out of proportion to what is really likely.
This movie is worth watching and is a lush and expensive production, but ultimately flat and frustrating. I’ll give it a C.