Gangster Squad Reviews
Top CriticGangster Squad looks the part, but it's so superficial it practically evaporates before our eyes.
Some of the clothes and makeup feel as glossy as paint, but, those aside, we seem to browsing through a display of secondhand goods.
It might sound like a stretch, imagining Penn playing that intense, indiosyncratic a villain. But the lauded, veteran actor pulls a left hook, then a right, and after a wild bodyshot at the tail end of the film, you see the true mania behind his eyes.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Director Ruben Fleischer and screenwriter Will Beall can't decide whether to make a spoof or a serious drama, so they wrongheadedly attempt both.
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| Original Score: C
Gangster Squad" is a highly stylized, pulp-fiction period piece based on true events.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Despite a cast of gifted actors, lush 1940s production design and suave costumes, it's bereft of inspiration, plowing familiar terrain past the point of tedium to impatience.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Gangster Squad is to the great tradition of the Scarface genre what plastic is to cutlery - tiny, imitative, disposable.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Any resemblance to history here is restricted to some snazzy spectator shoes and cans of Schlitz beer.
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| Original Score: 2/4
"Gangster Squad" talks tough and hits hard, but it is a victim of its own brute force.
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| Original Score: C
A cartoonish 1940s shoot-'em-up that's impossible to take seriously.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Director Ruben Fleischer leans hard on the violence card, but with little return in the way of excitement, and at the expense of character and story.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, Gangster Squad is one of those movies you can't talk about without invoking other (often better) movies.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Gangster Squad is The Untouchables moved west and cheesed up.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A triumph of production design but a pretty dull kill-'em-up otherwise.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Apart from the gore -- and there's plenty -- this is basically L.A. Confidential without the script.
A bullet-riddled bloodbath with an all-star cast, Gangster Squad is a lurid and ludicrous Mob thriller that glorifies a gangland lifestyle.
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| Original Score: 2/4
There's only so much style can do to spiff up shriveled substance.
"Gangster Squad" would have been more fun as an animated feature, with fanciful animals in the principal roles.
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| Original Score: 2/5
When the gun smoke clears, the body count is finished and the blood is mopped up, "Gangster Squad" is little more than another Hollywood wannabe overshadowed by the legacy of "L.A. Confidential"...
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| Original Score: 2/5
A complete whitewashing of one of the most vicious and racist paramilitary organizations in American history: the Los Angeles Police Department.
Gangster Squad's violence has a graphic, contemporary feel that's at odds with the vintage crime pics the film wants to celebrate. This isn't the heavy-handed CG-noir of Sin City, but even so, it feels fake.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The actors do their best, but they're bringing their "A" game to a decidedly "B" production, with Penn being the most enthusiastic of this game crew.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Gangster Squad [is] a mob epic that flushes a classy cast (Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone) down the sinkhole of creative bankruptcy.
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| Original Score: 1/4
It's almost terrible. It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What's missing from Gangster Squad is a core, a point of view, something to patch together the cheese and carnage.
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| Original Score: C-
Fleischer's noir-influenced focus on O'Mara and Cohen offers hints of interesting commentary about Hollywood's historical visions of good and evil. But it's a strong starting point that fizzles by the finale.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Its determination to follow The Untouchables' template (without the benefit of a David Mamet script) makes it a little too predictable to be memorable.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A good-looking cast and strong action sequences are just enough to forgive the cornball script.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
By the time it fades to black, "Gangster Squad" has squandered most of its early promise.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It's all just noise disguised as entertainment.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
All the people in the picture are playing at their characters, rather than actually playing the characters. Everyone looks grand in their period clothes, but they're making make-believe that is not in the least bit believable.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
If nothing else, it's way better than you'd expect any movie released by a major studio in January would ever be.
Bits and pieces here and there entertain. But it never really comes together in a satisfying way, and given the talent involved, that adds up to a big disappointment.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Though based partly on actual events, Ruben Fleischer's ludicrous shoot-'em-up plays fast and loose with the facts, and plenty else besides.
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| Original Score: 2/5
As they'd say back in the day: Sweetheart, give me rewrite.
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| Original Score: 2/4
'So it's a shame that "Gangster Squad" is nothing like a good old-fashioned gangster picture. While it's a period piece that clearly relishes its evocation of neon-bright Los Angeles in 1949, it's hardly old-fashioned. And it's no good at all ...
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| Original Score: 1/5
Despite the flaws and the occasional corn, this is still one of the most exhilarating and entertaining action films in recent memory.
A crime against cinematic sensibility.
An impressively pulpy underworld-plunger that embellishes on a 1949 showdown between a dedicated team of LAPD officers and Mob-connected Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) for control of the city.
These are good actors, but aside from Brolin and Gosling, they're barely given any special moments of their own to make their marks here.
