Gangster lives by the gun, dies by the gun

Before Gangster Squad was made, someone involved in its production probably found themselves watching L.A. Confidential and thinking, “This would be great with more guns.” And that’s how movies get made, folks.

It should be noted here that L.A. Confidential is a perfect movie, one that you probably would have heard more about if it didn’t come out three months before Titanic. It was a neo-noir police thriller filled with nuance and mystery; its pace was deliberately tedious and it rewarded careful viewing with dark secrets. Like the police in its plot, it plodded along on tips and hard-boiled hunches, not action sequences, although there are a few of those, too.

Now here is Gangster Squad, a movie that frames all of its drama behind cocked revolvers, racked shotguns and a chorus of ca-clicks as cop and crook alike ready machine guns for the purging of blood. Even when the guns aren’t spewing hot lead they’re used as clubs on heads and battering rams against ribcages. This all leads up to a glorifying slow-mo ballet of bullets shredding through a hotel lobby, tearing ornaments from a Christmas tree and obliterating furniture into explosions of shrapnel and splinters. The people behind Gangster Squad intended this to be beautiful. I found it sad.

Gangster Squad will go down in history as the commemorative trophy given to Americans to mark the beginning of the coming gun debate. Recall that after the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., trailers featuring a similar theater massacre in Gangster Squad were pulled from TV. The scenes were cut and replaced, and the movie was delayed by months. During the delay, Sandy Hook happened. Now it’s difficult to see gun violence in movies without thinking of real victims. This movie rubs your nose in it.

The Ruben Fleischer-directed movie stars James Brolin as Sgt. O’Mara, a no-nonsense cop given a free pass to take down real-life gangster Mickey Cohen, who held a tight grip around Los Angeles in the 1940s. We see Cohen first, as he’s using two cars to tear a snitch in half. He’s played by Sean Penn with a vile snarl and droopy prosthetic features around his eyes. Before he stretches a man's inside out all over the pavement, Cohen is shown clobbering away at a punching bag in slow motion, his veins bulging and his skin rippling from the explosive force of his punches. The audience is the punching bag. 

O’Mara’s first task is to recruit his team that will eventually include a smooth-talking playboy (Ryan Gosling), a radio nerd (Giovanni Ribisi), a Wild West gunslinger (Robert Patrick) and a Mexican rookie (Michael Peña). A knife-throwing vice cop (Anthony Mackie) also joins the team, but don’t expect the movie to comment about his race — the character is black — because, you know, it being the 1940s and all. It’s a curious omission.

With no laws governing the rogue team of cops, they set off to make life very unpleasant for Mickey Cohen and his rackets involving blackmailed judges, gambling dens, the heroin trade, extortion syndicates and sex parlors. Cohen, a very chatty gangster, invokes Manifest Destiny in his explanation of his expansion: “Everything. It’s all mine,” he says with a dame on his arm and a bulldog at his feet.

Gangster Squad has a wonderful look, from the boxy cars and Art Deco architecture to the square suits and palm-lined streets. It looks and feels authentic, even during CGI shots that pan across Hollywood Boulevard to reveal Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and then up to the hills where a sign reads (accurately) “Hollywoodland.” Even Gosling gets in the spirit by giving his character a higher-pitched timbre, the kind of voice you’d hear from characters in Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney movies.

Much of the dialogue even has a period-appropriate edge to it. “The penalty for poaching the king’s deer is a permanent vacation in a pine box,” one character says of Mickey Cohen’s girlfriends. In another scene, a police chief has a great noir-inspired line: “Two things you can’t take back in this job: bullets out of your gun and words out of your mouth.” The Anthony Mackie character has a line that draws laughs from Californians: “I always knew I’d die in Burbank.”

The dialogue is exceptional, but even it is drowned out by one action sequence after another as the gangster squad moves from shootout to shootout. One of the cops even suggests that their game plan is flawed: “We can’t keep doing it this way. Eventually, we’re going to get killed.” I kept thinking the pace would change after that line, but then it descended once again into another mindless shootout. The finale of the movie is all guns, every second of it, as the cops waltz into Cohen’s lair for a crescendo of lead-infused violence.

By accentuating the gunplay, Gangster Squad fails to explore the moral ambiguity of untethered police officers. How easy it would be to for them to hate the laws that define who they are. These men are mere inches away from being crooks themselves, but there they are fighting their own perceptions of right and wrong to protect the public. These are interesting subjects, but Gangster Squad ignores them because of its preoccupation with bullets.

I liked the look and feel of Gangster Squad, and I even greatly admired much of the writing and acting. Then it loses focus. And the gun violence is unsettling, especially in the way it’s glorified and stylized. We’re in a different world now, and Gangster Squad is still living in the old one.