Sadly Over-hyped

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

This is a fictionalized version of the story of LA gangster Mickey Cohen, excellently portrayed by Sean Penn who looks nothing like him. The action takes place in 1949/1950 and is not shot in black and white. Combat veteran Sgt. John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) is asked to form a squad of elite men to take down Mickey Cohen, but not as cops, but as a gangsters hitting his places one by one.John has a pregnant wife (Mireille Enos) who would rather leave town than have her husband take on the mobster. Saddled with the fact it won't happen, she helps her husband assemble a squad which includes Jerry (Ryan Gosling) a playboy cop who is seeing Mickey's girlfriend (Emma Stone). Emma Stone has played too many down to earth women to pull off a swanky mobster girl. She looked like a kid who was playing in her mommy's make-up box. Perhaps that was the genius of the film as she was to suppose to be a small town girl out of place.Jerry uses a pick up line from 1941 comedy "Hold That Ghost" when he talks about playing post office. Again, was this bad writing or would have someone used a line from a film? At times the characters acted like they came out of "Sin City," stereotypes of themselves. Where do they get all these new Packards to shoot up?The film had some good lines such as Sean Penn: "All good things must one day be burnt to the ground for insurance money." There is enough humor in the film to keep it from becoming dry.Now the bad news is that Mickey Cohen was actually brought down by the IRS and not the gangster squad. His girlfriend Liz (not Grace)did three years because she wouldn't testify against him. So as far as facts go, rate this well below an Oliver Stone film. I liked the film, but not because there was any truth to it.Parental Guide: F-bombs. No sex. Stripper with large pasties.

"Gangster Squad" saves its best material for the montages. Those sequences are where the movie's flair for costuming, bullets and violence are at their most succinct and enjoyable.But disappointment seems to lurk around every corner because it echoes "L.A. Confidential" and "The Untouchables" but comes nowhere near either one of those. It's a movie that looks good, but wastes its cast on cardboard cutouts. Take Emma Stone for instance, all dolled up in those dresses and she really has nothing to do. And her character is crucial to the story's tension.It's one of the emptiest movies I've seen in a long time.5/10

A few days ago I have seen the brand new 'Black Mass' which is also a mob story made in Hollywood and enjoying the participation of a fine cast. I was not enthusiastic. 'Gangster Squad' directed by Ruben Fleischer has the few ingredients that I was missing in that film, which make the genre 'mob story inspired by real characters' much more enjoyable to me. It does start with 'inspired by a true story' (or 'true characters'), inserts the inevitable 'true crime' photos, and ends with the even more unavoidable text and pictures about the years spent in jail by the surviving bad guys, and the years happily spent fighting crime and raising kids by the good guys (those who survived, of course). In the middle it does better.The story of 'Gangster Squad' is set in the post-war LA, and this certainly helps as the place and the period seems to gather interests because of the classical 'noire' thrillers that it inspired followed by a number of successful movies (starting with The Maltese Falcon, of course, set and filmed in 1941). The despicable bad guy's name is Micky Cohen and his overtaking of the city could not (at least according to the script) be fought but by unconventional vigilante methods, because most of the police and judicial system was corrupted by hum. Find the right cops, motivated enough by having fought and survived WWII in order to build a world worth being lived by their kids, add the necessary dose of romantic, get a stunt master and a good choreographer for the fights and chases, and success is almost ensured.The story may be more remote from the truth than in 'Black Mass', the capabilities of the squad in fights and shooting may seem overrated, but at the end of the day the result was more enjoyable for me. It certainly helped to have on board such a fine team of actors, including Sean Penn as the ultimate bad guy, 'can't do wrong' Ryan Gosling, and beautiful Emma Stone who always seems to create around her a fascinating touch of mystery very appropriate in this movie. 'Gangster Squad' is a mob story that works and succeeds to be an entertaining film.

Gangster Squad was one of the biggest let downs I've experienced at the movie theaters. With the names: Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Anthony Mackie, Michael Peña, and Giovanni Ribisi attached to this project I assumed that this film would be a huge hit. But do you know the saying about assumptions? The film is based on the story of Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), an east coast gangster who brought organized crime out west to LA, and John O'Mara (Josh Brolin), a cop hired to assemble a team to take down Cohen by any means possible. This included using violence without punishment from the law. This premise bodes well for a good gangster flick but doesn't deliver on any front.The acting was fairly bad, the plot was unoriginal, the dialogue poor, and the directing terrible. There were only a few scenes in the film that I actually enjoyed, but most of the time I was either cringing in my seat or stifling a laugh. Gangster Squad had its release pushed back because of the movie theater shootings at the Dark Knight Rises. They had to do extensive re-shoots because a scene in the movie depicted gunmen coming out blazing from behind a theater screen shooting into the crowd. Rumors stated that removing this scene was like pulling a thread from a sweater. But regardless of what the movie could of been it ultimately was a flop.