These wiseguys are taking over Los Angeles, see? It’d take a gaggle of chiseled coppers with more balls than brains to take on that lot. Such is the tired premise of Gangster Squad. Clad in fedoras and cheap cliches, Josh Brolin “acts” as a tough-as-nails copper who’d get away from all this gunfire with his pregnant wife if he could just clean up this rotten town. Tasked by the Chief with taking out the trash, Brolin assembles a ruthless “Gangster Squad” of wild card rebels like Robert Patrick and Giovanni Ribisi. A lisping, ineffectual Ryan Gosling joins in mostly to keep sleeping with mobster girl Emma Stone. The off-the-books team set out to tear apart the operations of long lost Dick Tracy villain Mickey Cohen (an unstable Sean Penn). Positively dripping with hilariously awful dialogue, Gangster Squad earns some spark from shining production design, but is otherwise shamefully awful.
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2013.
The Coast is far too cool for movies that don’t take themselves 100% seriously.