Review: Gangster Squad

21st January 2013

Like every clear-thinking, warm-blooded creature on the planet, I’m a fan of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. They both succeed in being consistently beautiful, charming, smart and sassy, inciting a tumultuous mix of envy, desire and wanting them to be your BFF.

With this in mind, I was very excited last November, when I saw the trailer for Gangster Squad. “Ooh!” I said, turning to my friend, “that looks awesome!” Ryan and Emma playing sexy 1940’s film noir characters? A battle for the soul of Los Angeles? Sean Penn as a mob boss? Yes please.

Skip forward three months, and it’s been a struggle to write this review. I saw Gangster Squad last Wednesday, but I’ve only just got around to pulling out my laptop and putting fingers to keyboard. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion about the film; it’s that my opinion ranges between “meh” and “well… that was a bit disappointing.”

Admittedly, it looks great: a 21^st Century take on the gritty yet slick, high contrast film noir style. Gosling and Stone look stunning, whilst Josh Brolin (as “good cop in a bad world” Sgt. O’Mara) appears like an old school superhero, his rugged features smoothed over into a shiny comic book cover. The shoot-outs are equally pretty, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen many times before, with a final slow-mo firefight in a lobby heavily reminiscent of the Matrix.

The problem with this film isn’t that it’s badly made, it’s that it’s dull. The plot is gangster-movie-by-numbers: pulling together a group of vaguely maverick cops to try to take out an evil mob boss, who meet with some success and some failure and in the end everyone goes home with a slice of cake. The characters are straightforward and simplistic, with the actors never being forced to move out of first gear. Considering director Ruben Fleischer was behind 2009’s Zombieland, which took a tried and tested film formula and put a cheeky, self-aware twist on it, it’s a shame he didn’t pull a similar trick with Gangster Squad. Instead we have something which is all style, minimal substance; watchable but not exciting.

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