Truly Dreadful Film

Touches You

Sorry, this movie sucks

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

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

Ever since No Country For Old Men came out (which is a really well-made, compelling film), casting agents have been way too nice to Josh Brolin causing what I term the Josh Brolin effect.While he is certainly a good actor, he has been given too many roles since NCFOM where he has been badly miscast and has watered down or hurt what may have been some pretty good movies Gangster Squad included (Let's see...also Oldboy, Jonah Hex, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, AND AND some brilliant minds thought he would make a great Thanos, Whatttt???). He looks tired, he drags on and some might even say his acting in said movies is unconvincing of the characters he plays like he just reads the script and says "All right lets do this and get it over with so they can throw me in some other movie I probably don't belong in". Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena and most certainly Robert Patrick all outshine Brolin in Gangster Squad in significantly smaller roles. Then there's Sean Penn's overacting, how he didn't get a 3rd best actor academy award or even a nomination is beyond me. When this movie was released you see all the star power involved and you say to yourself "Damn, I gotta go see that!" then when it ends at least I was saying to myself "Thank god for trailers cause at least Josh Brolin and Sean Penn were not in any of them".

My senses were assaulted by the miserable excuse for a film today.New words have to be invented to describe how mind-numbingly dreadful this piece of garbage is.There is no cliché or stereotype you can think of that is not present here.Professional lox, Josh Brolin, scowls throughout the movies in what he apparently thought was how a supposedly tough cop acted.The other actors failed to even meet the low standard set by Brolin.The exception is Sean Penn whose portrayal of Mickey Cohen was redolent of ham but leagues ahead of the rest of the performers.Although I had never seen "Gangster Squad" before, the script was so hackneyed and trite that I knew how every scene would end as soon as it started.They even stuck an Abbott & Costello gag in there ("Post Office is a kid's game", "Not the way I play it")Senseless and ludicrous gunfights abound here. One gunfight scene had a hood holding and firing a Thompson sub-machine gun in each hand without a bit of recoil from the very powerful gun.This film is unbelievably bad. Not in the so-bad-it's-good way either but in the dreadful I-can't-wait-for-it-to end way.There is not one redeeming quality to this film.Every copy of this film should be gathered up and burned.