1 of 5 | Robert De Niro plays both Vito Genovese (L) and Frank Costello in “The Alto Knights,” in theaters Friday. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
LOS ANGELES, March 19 (UPI) — The Alto Knights, in theaters Friday, is a mob movie in need of enlivening. Though Robert De Niro plays two roles, neither invigorate the sequence of historical events.
The film opens in 1957 New York with crime boss Frank Costello (De Niro) surviving an assassination attempt. He reflects on his lifelong friendship with fellow mobster Vito Genovese (De Niro) and the criminal enterprises that took them down separate paths.
Costello and Genovese were real-life figures of New York organized crime. In Costello’s telling, he ran speakeasies during Prohibition to provide alcohol to paying customers.
Genovese ultimately continued his underworld dealings long past prohibition and built his empire despite Costello’s warnings. Costello was in charge of the Luciano family while Genovese served in World War II, and by the time he returned, Costello had added legitimate businesses that took attention off the racketeering enterprises.
Furthermore, Costello refused to vacate his position as head of the families, to which Genovese felt entitled. Yet Genovese’s continued criminal activities still implicated Costello and his wife, Bobbie (Debra Messing).
De Niro distinguishes Costello and Genovese as separate characters. Costello is the more typical De Niro seen in Goodfellas, Casino and The Irishman, which impressionists love to impersonate.
Genovese, meanwhile, is more of a caricature, down to a James Cagney-style gangster voice. As Genovese, De Niro also wears a prosthetic nose and chin and covers his mole.
The script by Nicholas Pileggi, who also wrote Goodfellas and Casino, covers the history from Costello and Genovese’s childhoods through the Kefauver Senate Committee Hearings and downfall of the families.
The epic timeline demands a kinetic approach like Martin Scorsese took with his mafia movies. While it is valiant not to imitate a master, Barry Levinson’s film collapses under the weight of its subject.
Costello narrates the film, sometimes speaking directly to the camera, like an interview subject in a documentary. Black-and-white still photo montages illustrate many of the events he summarizes.
In a dramatic film, this has the effect of skipping over major significant events and showing characters react to things the viewer barely got to see. Costello is describing the sorts of things that Goodfellas and Casino showed, though a few brutal acts of violence are depicted.
Genovese is the sort of character Joe Pesci played in previous mob films, but the actor apparently only comes out of retirement for Scorsese or Pete Davidson. Casting De Niro in both roles is potentially interesting, but the relationship lacks the connection that would make a betrayal feel poignant.
Costello and Genovese rarely meet in the film. Those meetings amount to little more than disagreements where Costello asks Genovese to go straight and Genovese says no. It does not convey the lifelong friendship of which Costello’s narration speaks.
The Alto Knights appears to be afraid to implicate Costello. The film portrays him as so passive he is rather unbelievable.
Costello stopped carrying a gun after his honeymoon and became a legitimate businessman. He still wants everything to blow over since he survived the assassination attempt, so vetoes the retaliation his associates are demanding.
It reflects documented history when Costello cooperates with Senator Estes Kefauver (Wallace Langham) in his hearings on organized crime while every other witness pleads the fifth. This is a good scene and livens up the film for a bit.
By the time Costello organizes a meeting of all the family heads at an upstate New York farm, the film devotes a lot of time to non sequitur dialogue about the history of Mormons during the long drive. That is cinematic real estate that could have been devoted to more relevant material earlier.
The Alto Knights has all the facts, with reasonable allowances for dramatic license to fit in a two-hour movie. It just lacks the emotion and viscerality of other dramatizations of mafia history.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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Running time: 102 minutes. PG (some thematic elements, rude humor). In theaters.
Long before ChatGPT was a household name, Hollywood had been making AI the villain for decades — from HAL 9000 to Skynet to Agent Smith.
Yet the most emotionally involving spin on the terrors of tech in ages arrives not from groundbreaking sci-fi, but the smart, wonderful and tremendously funny fifth “Toy Story” movie.
That’s a surprise, since it’s a film that I really hoped would never happen. After middling “4,” which was a giant step down from the heartbreaking third, the world was more than ready for Woody and Buzz to ride off into the sunset. Woody actually did.
Well, it’s good that Tom Hanks and Tim Allen got back behind the mike, because the digital age gives Pixar’s playthings a renewed sense of purpose and atypically high stakes. Usually the gang helps a young person stay in touch with their childhood. This time, they save one in progress.
That’s the formative years of little Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the girl who inherited the dolls from Andy (who’s now, like, 40) in the last movie. She’s 8 years old, paralyzed by shyness and totally friendless. Desperate, Bonnie begs her parents to buy her a Lilypad, an interactive touchscreen that’s all the rage at school.
Yes, the baddie that Woody (Hanks), Buzz (Allen) and Jessie (Joan Cusack) must face this time is an alarmingly cute tablet, voiced by Greta Lee.
So, rather than humanity’s fears of artificial intelligence taking control of the nuclear arsenal or replacing us with cyborgs, director Andrew Stanton’s “5” taps into a much more immediate concern: screens rewiring kids’ minds.
Much like when action figure Buzz arrived, sigh, 31 years ago, the toys are mortified by the mysterious intruder and her luminescent ilk. As they look across their neighborhood, all they can see for blocks are glowing blue windows with zombie youths staring into the 10×10 void.
The end is nigh, they think. How can a cowboy, cowgirl and a space cadet compete against a reactive mini-computer that connects a lonely child to the entire planet?
But these toys aren’t ready for the dark recesses of eBay just yet. They go head to head — or plastic to plastic — with Lilypad, whom Lee gives a voice that’s both bestie and “Mean Girls.”
You may recall lovebirds Woody and Bo Peep went off on their own at the end of the last chapter. Of course, they find their way back, but Jessie is running things now. That’s a refreshing and appropriate switch-up. Cusack’s maternal performance is better suited to this particular adventure than Hanks’ “old buddy, old pal” delivery.
After a sleepover mishap, Jessie winds up lost at another house — her first one, it turns out — where a girl named Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) lives. And it’s there we meet perhaps the best new character in this franchise since 1995: Smarty Pants.
The real misfit toys aren’t the OG crew, we learn, but obsolete computer devices from the aughts. One is Conan O’Brien’s Smarty Pants, a hysterical, hyperactive box that teaches tykes how to use the toilet. He’s been powered down for years and therefore goes berserk when juiced up.
O’Brien is — and I’m sure he’d agree — a toy trapped in a man’s body. He’s practically typecasting. And his demented acting is so energetic and untethered, you can picture Disney security guards hauling him out of the recording studio. I mean that in a good way.
There’s also a lot of fun mined from a shipment of misplaced Buzzes. We check in on the look-alikes occasionally as they morph into a phalanx of determined Navy SEALs to eventually join Jessie and Co.
“Five” is arguably the first new “Toy Story” film to be both watched and understood by the kids of the 1995 original’s millennial audience. That shared experience is very moving all by itself.
But, even more poignantly, who can teach these young parents this vital lesson in 21st-century child-rearing better than their own toys?
3.5/5 stars
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