GANGSTER SQUAD

Sean Penn, with his putty nose and over-the-top theatrics, appears to be channeling his inner Al Pacino more than actually trying to portray real-life Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen in GANGSTER SQUAD (2013). Pacino, you may recall, played cartoon crime boss "Big Boy" in Warren Beatty's four-color fantasia DICK TRACY (1990). Pacino was absolutely out of control in that ambitious failure of a film and one can only wonder what an imaginary movie starring Pacino, Marlon Brando, William Shatner and Rod Steiger and directed by either Ken Russell or Oliver Stone might look like. I think the screen would literally explode (as would more than a few heads in the audience) from the amount of histrionically insane acting and directing on display. But I digress.

The fact is, Penn's portrayal of Cohen is entirely okay in the context of this action packed, cops and gangsters crime film. GANGSTER SQUAD  falls short of both Brian De Palma's THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987) and Curtis Hanson's L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997) in it's depiction of days-gone-by mobsters and molls. But it is nevertheless an extremely entertaining film, with a top-notch cast, brilliant production design and machine guns. Lots of machine guns.

Josh Brolin stars as square-jawed, straight-arrow cop John O'Mara. He's a WWII veteran looking for another war to fight and he absolutely cannot be bought. O'Mara is put in charge of the "Gangster Squad" by L.A. police chief Bill Parker (Nick Nolte). Parker doesn't mind bending the rules to get Mickey Cohen before he controls all of the vice in Los Angeles. If GANGSTER SQUAD had been made forty years ago, Nolte would have played O'Mara with some character actor like Charles Durning playing Parker.

O'Mara recruits pretty boy Sergeant Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) as his second-in-command. The rest of the squad is made up of Detective Coleman Harris (Anthony Mackie), Detective Conwell Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi), Detective Navidad Ramirez (Michael Pena) and Detective Max Kennard (Robert Patrick). Harris is wicked with a switch-blade, Keeler is the electronics brain of the outfit, bugging Cohen's house for inside information, Ramirez is a rookie anxious to prove himself while Kennard is the last of the old-time gunfighters who still carries a big iron on his hip. Not all of these men will survive the war against Cohen.

Caught in the crossfire is the beautiful Grace Faraday (Emma Stone). Grace is Cohen's etiquette teacher (she's not doing a very good job, frankly) who falls in love with Wooters.

Will Beall's screenplay, based on Paul Lieberman's non-fiction book of the same name, takes more than a few liberties with the truth while director Ruben Fleischer adds some visually stylish flourishes to scenes to add snap and excitement. GANGSTER SQUAD is brimming with period detail. The clothes, the cars, the music, the locations (some real, some digital), all evoke Los Angeles, 1949, in a way that only a Hollywood movie can. There are car chases and gun battles galore and while the film brought in a disappointing $46 million in North America (against a cost of $60 million), it's nevertheless a fun ride into a glamorous past populated by tough cops, vicious gangsters and beautiful women.

GANGSTER SQUAD is one of my new favorite guilty pleasures. Check it out.