Theater Whore: Gangster Squad

I am listening to a review for Gangster Squad as I am writing this and I am wondering if they were in a bad mood when they saw this or even saw it. I’m not a movie critic. I’m just a dude that likes seeing movies and writing about them. I never wanna be at the point where I overanalyze the shit out of a movie and cant just enjoy it the way these guys at Spill are. Its as if they watched it writing down jokes just to use later and that’s a disservice for people who like their reviews and value their opinion. Enough about them!

I saw this with East over at the Arclight last night and I loved this movie. Let me just get that out of the way. It was more than I expected and had a lot of actors that I didn’t know were in it. I intentionally didn’t read up about this, choosing to go in blind. This is the story of a team of cops that are brought together by Josh Brolin to take down a Chicago gangster played by Sean Penn that is ruining the city. Nick Nolte plays the police chief that assigns Brolin the task of doing this though his wife is the one that tells him that he needs less clean cut cops.

Penn and his right hand man played by Troy Garity are ruthless. I have to point out Garity because I kept thinking “Where the hell do I know this guy from?” and he played the White guy barber in Barbershop years ago. He looks badass by the way. Penn’s etiquette coach is played by Emma Stone who is ridiculous hot in this. Ryan Gosling, who is a cop and reluctantly joins the team as he is fine drinking and gambling, falls for her. They have to keep their thing secret since they’d both be killed immediately if they are found out.

Worth it!

When the team is brought together its pretty cool. You have Robert Patrick as the gunslinger and his protégé played by Michael Pena. Anthony Mackie who I didn’t hate for once. And Giovanni Ribisi as the electronics expert. Ribisi after a certain point, meaning almost immediately, begins to question if there’s a difference between the way they are behaving and the people they are fighting. They are shooting guys in the leg and tossing them off cliffs, throwing knives into folks hands, and generally kicking all kind of mobster ass. So, yeah. They’re pretty much as bad as the bad guys.

There are scenes in this movie where I said “Whoa…” out loud. In the beginning there is a slow motion scene where Penn is using a punching bag that shows every vein and ripple in his arms that looks amazing. There is a fight scene where every time the muzzle flashes on a gun the camera freezes for a split second. Just lots of tricks that made an action packed scene even better.

This movie has a lot of actors in it so its hard to give all of them equal time on the screen, but they managed to make me care enough about everyone so that when something bad happened I was like “Oh, damn it.” Some people have been bitching about the violence. The director is the same guy that did Zombieland so it could actually be worse. The violence at the end of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 is more intense than the worst scene in this.

The characters were just that. Characters. Exaggerated versions of folks in that time period. It was awesome seeing L.A back in the 40’s and how different things were. It seems Burbank was a place no one wanted to be. I worked in Burbank. I agree. I’d definitely see this movie again.