REVIEW - GANGSTER SQUAD

or: How to Mimic a Half Dozen Better Films, Badly. Ruben Fleischer's watery noir isn't set in 1949 L.A., as it purports, but in a cinematic ether, where good films linger, and dreck like this pass through, deriving what they can from their infantile perception of what makes those films good. It's lowbrow filmmaking masquerading as highbrow, meaningful, memorable. Not trying to be both pulp and high art simultaneously - trying to be one, and thereby, in its calamitous failure, exposing its identity as the other. Fleischer is focused on the violence - not on manufacturing an atmosphere of violence, of threatening unease, but on enlivening scenes with graphic violence and crass car chases, fight scenes, shoot-outs. These are genre staples which have become such via iconic usage in iconic films, and a plethora of inept imitations. They're not viable storytelling devices unless they're important to the story; here, they're arbitrary, perhaps applied only as guises, to distract attention away from the incompetence of the direction elsewhere. Yet these scenes, too, are disastrously staged, not least in their inevitability - the fun thing to do while watching Gangster Squad is to predict what will happen next, have a nap, then wake up and see if your predictions have been realised. If they haven't, maybe you're of an appropriate level of intelligence for this film. The actors all seem too intelligent, though, to be speaking such abysmal dialogue, and collectively embarrass themselves in doing so, save Sean Penn, who also embarrasses himself when he's not speaking, and Giovanni Ribisi, whose interpretation of the Method seems to be to make like he's going to win a separate Oscar for every word he utters - one great actor giving a terrible performance, one terrible actor giving a terrible performance. And one terrible film.