I discovered this film when I saw a trailer of it on Youtube, it wasn’t long before I decided to give it a watch. Let me preface this review by saying I wasn’t excited for this film to begin with. It may have had Tom Hardy’s name attached to it, but the way it was marketed reminded me too much of other gangster crime drama’s that felt flat.
The first film I watched from Trank was Chronicle. I enjoyed it more than I had expected and I thought that Trank delivered something entertaining for the found footage genre. He also made Fantastic Four, which I haven’t seen, and yet I heard the movie tanked pretty badly. An minor issue that I had with this film to begin with was that it’s premise, was too similar to The Irishman. But this flaw didn’t ruin the viewing as opposed to my other complaints.
One of my least favorite Tom Hardy performances to be completely honest. I get that we are seeing his character when he is old and decrepit, but if I didn’t subtitles on I wouldn’t have understood a single word that he said. He sounded like Donald Duck in certain scenes and occasionally was over the top. I get that this film is trying to be more of a self-reflection of Al Capone’s life, but it just fails at that for me. We see him with his family, friends, etc. But it seems like nothing is really going on of any interest, it isn’t building to anything. I could care less about the “action”, in fact I wish they didn’t resort to the sudden bursts of insane violence, because that just seemed like a cheap gimmick to hold the audience’s attention. I felt disconnected to the protagonist and the rest of the characters, for they seemed too unlikable.
I wouldn’t use the word disappointment, because I wasn’t hyped for this film to begin with. There wasn’t much for me to enjoy here.
Cedric Cinema 