It's late 1949, and as the holidays approach, former-boxer-turned-Chicago-mobster Mickey Cohen ( Sean Penn) has expanded Meyer Lansky's Jewish mafia to Los Angeles, where's he's planning to monopolize drugs and gambling and squeeze his bosses out of the equation. Yet for all the production's post-war gloss and moody atmosphere, you still get the sense that Fleischer is barely suppressing an urge to spoof the genre. Cinematographer Dion Beebe, who earned an Oscar for his work on " Memoirs of a Geisha" (and was nominated for " Chicago"), bathes "Gangster Squad" in a rich palette of smoky shadows and dazzling night-life opulence. His film has the familiar look and feel of a gangster classic, with plenty of dark, burnished hardwoods, shiny vintage cars and meticulous attention to period details of costume, architecture and interior design. In "Gangster Squad," however, Fleischer seems out of his element. A comedy specialist stepping into semi-dramatic territory, director Ruben Fleischer scored a modest hit with 2009's giddy, satirical " Zombieland" (he is currently filming a sequel), and delivered plenty of laughs on TV, directing segments of HBO's "Funny or Die Presents" and working with Jimmy Kimmel, Zach Galifianakis, Michael Cera and Will Ferrell, among others. No amount of tinkering could repair the film's tonal inconsistencies. Nihilism may be the most fitting attitude in one of these instances, but it is jarring in the others - especially in a film whose interwoven structure suggests an intention to make sense of a world outsiders don’t understand.Not that it mattered much. But the screenplay fumbles some attempts to tie things together, offering abrupt moments of violence whose motivations we feel we ought to understand but don’t. The action becomes more familiarly story-driven as the film progresses, especially as we watch Rio’s first encounters with an attractive new student (musician Kelli Wakili, credited here as Kelli Strader). (An abundance of facial tattoos makes the latter job easier.) The quasi-documentary approach suits Rechenberg’s no-frills, realistic dialogue, but doesn’t keep it from growing mundane over the course of the longish pic. He and DP Lyn Moncrief frame scenes tightly with a handheld camera that tags along restlessly for much of the film, we follow behind characters so much that we can identify the backs of their heads more readily than their faces. Instead, Rechenberg focuses on making us feel like we’re silent observers moving within their world. ![]() Rio, though seemingly smarter than his peers and gentle at heart, goes along too readily with bad-news acquaintances Flores, a new prison guard getting an education from coworkers in how to abuse his authority, puts up no fight that we see when they make him part of their no-snitching brotherhood. Though we see enough of each man’s private life to understand his motivations to some extent - even if we hardly sympathize when Miguel violently pushes for increased stature in his aunt’s crime organization - none offers the kind of viewer-surrogate moral framework most films of this sort provide.
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