The problem with calling a movie “bad” is that some people, myself included, will only want to see it more. It’s fun to hear about a good movie. It’s boring to hear about a mediocre one. But a film that’s so punishing you can physically feel it? Now that’s fascinating. Truly terrible movies are like the puzzle box from “Hellraiser,” offering pain and pleasure, indivisibly. Only by experiencing both extremes can some lifelong moviegoers truly feel alive.
So let me be absolutely, 100% clear: “The Alto Knights” is indeed a bad movie, but not the good kind. It doesn’t make you feel alive, it makes you feel dead. It’s a tedious, directionless, bumbling chore of a gangster picture, incoherently written and edited, featuring two of the limpest performances of Robert De Niro’s career.
Oh yes, you read that right. De Niro plays two different characters in Barry Levinson’s leaden gangster biopic. He plays Frank Costello, a quasi-respectable mobster, and Vito Genovese, a total monster. Why he plays both characters is never explained, or even hinted at. Costello and Genovese weren’t twin brothers. They weren’t even related. Even on a thematic level the creative decision to cast De Niro twice barely registers. Maybe these men are two sides of the same coin, but so are George Washington and a bald eagle, and Robert De Niro probably shouldn’t play both of them either.
Maybe De Niro was eager to challenge himself, but you wouldn’t know it from watching “The Alto Knights.” He gives such a low-energy, unfocused performance as Frank Costello that his performance as Vito Genovese — manic and mean — plays like Daffy Duck in comparison. Watching De Niro act opposite himself could have been a bold cinematic moment, one of our finest actors pushing himself to the edge, challenging the versatility of his own craft and the limits of his celebrated talent. Instead it plays like a YouTube sketch where the same comic plays every role with different glasses or a mustache … and it makes almost as much dramatic impact.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around Costello, who grew up with Genovese but took over the organized crime business when Genovese was hiding out in Europe. It was supposed to be a brief arrangement, but they really should have been reading the newspapers when they worked out the details because World War II broke out and Genovese was stuck overseas for years. By the time he finally gets back to the States, Costello wants nothing to do with him, but begrudgingly gives him some territory to control in the hopes that he’ll chill out.
Genovese is a loose cannon. A live wire. He’s bad, dang it, and Costello is, well, he’s not good, but he’s comparatively chill. Some might even say doddering. De Niro seems so disengaged whenever Costello is talking that it often looks like he’s simply forgotten his lines. His wife, played by Debra Messing, occasionally pops her head into the room to complain about something and sound worried. He tells her everything will be fine. This seems to be the majority of their relationship.
“The Alto Knights,” named after a local club that never figures into the story except as a brief, perfunctory anecdote, sleepwalks through a few decades of Costello and Genovese’s lives. There’s no meaningful throughline, and every time the film settles into a subplot long enough to look like it’s finally getting somewhere, it soon gives up and lists lackadaisically in another direction. The movie begins with Costello being shot in the face and it’s so haphazardly edited that when the story finally catches up with that moment, it’s hard to remember whether it happened already or if we’ve been stuck in a long, tedious flashback. It doesn’t seem to matter either way.
That “The Alto Knights” is credited to Barry Levinson (“Rain Man,” “Bugsy”), screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi (“Goodfellas,” “Casino”) and cinematographer Dante Spinotti (“Heat,” “L.A. Confidential”) is hard to reckon with. One hopes that it’s a misprint. Aside from De Niro’s stunt casting, the film makes no big swings and takes few artistic chances. If “The Alto Knights” came up short because it tried too hard, one might sympathize and maybe even give it credit for its good intentions. Instead it just sits there, barely functioning as a movie — and why?
I’m really asking here. Why? It’s genuinely difficult to parse out what “The Alto Knights’” intentions are. If the film intends, as the finale implies, to say that organized crime is very disorganized, it was not necessary to make an annoyingly disorganized movie to hammer in the point. If the connection between Costello and Genovese had meaning, they either forgot to make it or it was so superficial they needn’t have bothered. And if the point was to entertain the audience in some way, to enlighten or challenge some of the people in the theater, they blew that too.
So yes, “The Alto Knights” is bad. It’s not “so bad it’s good.” It’s “so bad it’s bad.” It’s the boring, sloppy, meandering kind of bad, not the kind that makes headlines, not the kind that gets turned into memes. It’s an offer we can easily refuse.
“The Alto Knights” hits theaters this Friday.
