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Gangs of New York Movie Review

Gangs of New York is a 2002 epic historical drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s one of Scorsese’s weakest efforts.

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“When you kill a king, you don’t stab him in the dark.

You kill him where the entire court can watch him die“

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Amsterdam sets out to avenge the death of his father who was killed in a gang fight at the hands of a crime lord, Bill “The Butcher”. Whilst doing so, he gets caught up in the Civil War. Scorsese is known for his crime epics and historical dramas, but unlike something like say ‘The Aviator’ and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, Gangs of New York is pretty much a revisionist take on history. Nothing here was in any way grounded in reality or really happened at all in spite of the strong technical aspects.

I get what he was trying to say here. He effectively set out to show the deeply rooted problems of America, which are racism and xenophobia. For a country that has been built by immigrants, the treatment of said immigrants has most of the time been poor. But the problem here is that he put all of these different minorities in a melting pot and a boiler room basically and wrecked havoc on them, which never happened in such simple terms.

Thus, the movie functions more as an allegory than a piece of history. But it even doesn’t serve allegory all that well given that it’s so damn messy in every area. My main gripe was the acting and characterization. Daniel Day-Lewis was excellent in the role of the main villain, but this character felt a bit too unrealistic and over-the-top for me.

Leonardo DiCaprio was utterly forgettable in the main role. He was meant to be the most normal of all the characters, but that led to him being boring. This movie started their fruitful director-actor partnership, so at least we have that. As for Cameron Diaz, she was thoroughly miscast in what is an overly serious role for her. She was better than expected, but still this role demanded a much better actress.

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Gangs of New York features fantastic production design with meticulously built sets that evoked the NYC streets of the time so deftly. The costumes are also great, the score is pretty good and the cinematography is strong. The movie is technically quite superb, there is no denying that, but Scorsese failed to imbue the movie with deeper themes, more heart and stronger characters. The film lacked cohesion, a stronger structure and better pacing. Thus, it felt tedious and overlong. It was also way too dark and misanthropic for its own sake.