The Irishman (2019)
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The Irishman Movie Review
The Irishman is a 2019 historical crime film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino. It has its moments, but is otherwise dull and long.
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“You might be demonstrating
a failure to show appreciation“
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In the 1950s, truck driver Frank Sheeran gets involved with Russell Bufalino and his Pennsylvania crime family. As Sheeran climbs the ranks to become a top hit man, he also goes to work for Jimmy Hoffa – a powerful Teamster tied to organized crime. It’s a stereotypical Scorsese film in many regards as it follows these gangsters through years and decades with not much else to it.
Well, I did really like the third act, I loved it actually. Finally, the director made an anti-gangster statement by portraying how they ruin their families’ lives, and how ultimately hollow and horrible most of them remain even after decades of committing these crimes. There are some powerful conversations about that to be had here.
But that only lasted for thirty minutes or so. The rest of this movie is an incredibly boring, dull and mostly dragged, uninteresting crime drama with nothing new to offer to the genre or Hollywood itself which embraced it wholeheartedly, and very frustratingly.
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Scorsese can go out and state many times that he has made a movie, but the product speaks for itself. The Irishman is pretty much a television series, it rarely seemed like a cinematic film to me, quite the contrary. It’s a Netflix show which is very well made and acted, but it never seemed cinematic at any capacity.
That’s because the cinematography, the score, the overall production design are all very uninspired and the movie felt immensely small from beginning to end. Couple that with an excruciatingly long runtime, and you’ve got what is clearly a TV show disguised as a motion picture. The pacing is very slow, the runtime is never at all justified and at least half of it could have easily ended on the cutting floor.
I did like all of the performances. Al Pacino’s the least as his character is too over-the-top, and simply the praise that he got for this role is very excessive and not that earned. Joe Pesci is more memorable as he plays a different kind of character than he has ever played before, and he’s quite good in the role. Robert De Niro himself again plays a typical character for him. He’s very good here, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nothing that he hasn’t done before in his career.
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What I absolutely hated in The Irishman is the CGI. It’s simply horrible, and very off-putting. They put in 160 million dollars, and they wasted their money as the end result is very poorly done, very obviously fake and computerized, and simply unappealing and unnecessary when all is said and done. It took me out of it completely the same way that the CGI faces did in ‘It Chapter Two’ and I really hope that Hollywood stops doing this, but we can hope to no avail.
The Irishman is actually excellent in its third act. Finally, Scorsese made an anti-gangster statement, it took him decades, but he finally did it thankfully. Those thirty or so minutes are emotional, powerful and they leave a strong impression for sure. But the rest of the film, and I am talking about a huge rest, is very boring, uninteresting and excruciatingly slow. Half of this overlong movie could have easily been cut. Couple the length with the uninspired technical aspects and you’ve got what is essentially a TV show, rarely a cinematic picture. It has its good intentions which I admired and it is very well acted across the board, but it’s also very dull and filled with absolutely horrible CGI. They wasted so much money on this unappealing mess.
