or, “Running Around the Woods with Shrimp Cocktails”:
A spoiler-free mini movie review.
2.5 out of 5
There are few things more comforting to a cinephile than Robert De Niro calling someone an expletive & unloading an entire pistol clip into them.
It’s unwholesome, but this has been his playground for decades. The Alto Knights is an impassioned throwback to the Scorsese/De Niro collaborations of old, but lacks the oomph of those masterpieces.
GQ’s 2006 interview with Bob is required reading for anyone wanting an encapsulation of the stubborn actor. I’m not here to rag on De Niro: he’s had many legendary performances over his long career. But like any artist (*cough* senior), he’s set in his ways, rejects change, and becomes crotchety when he feels disrespected.
Now an octogenarian, Bob can’t just go back & retroactively change his De Niro-isms, no matter how much digital technology de-ages him (like in Scorsese’s The Irishman). Now forced into ‘grandpa’ roles that he may or may-not feel are beneath him (being a new dad at 81 certainly increases that obligation), audiences know exactly what to expect.
[cont’d]
It’s a treat, then, that Bob is only 50% his median in The Alto Knights. While one half of his dual performances (Frank Costello) is De Niro as we know him, his Vito Genovese is a nice switch-up, convincingly imitating his colleague Joe Pesci’s walking & talking ‘on pins & needles,’ right down to the sunglasses. The venerable prosthetic make-up is also worth mentioning.
Unluckily, Wag the Dog director Barry Levinson’s attachment to the dramatic side of the story lessens the film’s overall impact. Levinson is a great director, demonstrated here in an unusually-thrilling will-he-won’t-he senate inquiry, but he struggles to translate non-fiction novelist/screenwriter (and Goodfellas/Casino scribe) Nicholas Pileggi’s fact-based prose into his own vision. With less than 30 seconds of well-executed on-screen violence, the rest is relegated to archival footage, and the story structure – framed around an older Frank getting grilled Pileggi-style – is hopelessly derivative of the movies it’s replicating.
If that irritates you, then the film’s finale will devastate what goodwill remains. Don’t get me wrong, the setup is there (and the humour of the overweight mob bosses running around the woods in dress shoes with shrimp cocktails), but the sidebar of Palmyra, the country-bumpkin police, and repetitious cutaways of license plates burned me out.
The Alto Knights will give you your shot of De Niro, but that’s just a chaser for the double Benadryl.
//wd 3.26.2025
Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Do you think De Niro the actor is still capable of excelling, or has he settled into his groove? Do you think violence plays an integral part of these films and, by virtue, the lives they depict? Could you look passed Wallace Langham’s usual comedy facade to see his role as a Senator, or is he someone like De Niro where modern audiences could have trouble separating the consistencies in their filmography from their present role? Leave us a comment below!
theory of a daskeman 