Ensemble cast can’t carry Gangster Squad

Based on Paul Lieberman’s Tales from the Gangster Squad, Gangster Squad has a good premise. It centers on Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), an ex-boxer who’s trying to be the main mob boss in L.A. in 1949. So ruthless that he chains a man to a car to have his body torn in half, Mickey has the city’s police in his back pocket and can easily get away with killing off his rivals. The only thing standing in his way is Police Chief Parker (Nick Nolte), an honest cop who surreptitiously assigns his top sergeant, John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), a fearless World War II vet, to disrupt Mickey’s plans and send him packing.

John then puts together a motley posse that includes one of the department’s biggest playboys (Ryan Gosling), a sharp shooter (Robert Patrick) and his sidekick (Michael Pena), and a street-wise detective (Anthony Mackie). While John provides leadership and overall muscle, Conway Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi) is the brains of the operation. He places a wiretap in Mickey’s home that then enables them to target a few of the mobster’s establishments and disrupt his operation.

It’s not giving away too much to say that Mickey eventually figures out Parker’s plan and decides to take out the guys who make up his secret gangster squad. When Mickey starts to fight back, the violence escalates, setting up a dramatic showdown at his Plaza Hotel headquarters. In fact, the movie centers so much on the machine gun culture of the time period that its release date was postponed so that it would come out well after the Aurora, Colorado shooting. And that’s part of the problem. In the place of character and plot development, we get a series of dramatic, slow-mo shootouts and montages of gangsters and cops going at it.

And then there’s the issue of the film’s tone. It’s fine if director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, 30 Minutes or Less) wants the movie to be a cartoonish dark comedy, but the film constantly switches perspective and is alternately flippant and serious. The cast isn’t to blame here. Brolin is terrific as the headstrong sergeant and the actors who play his cohorts all hold their own, too. Though his New York accent is consistent with historical details (Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York) and he still makes a great bad guy, Penn doesn’t bring his usual intensity to the role.  Emma Stone is ultimately miscast as the love interest here; she just doesn’t have the right look or feel for the period. But the casting is really the movie’s strong suit. Its weakness is that, as others have noted, it lies somewhere between Dick Tracy and L.A. Confidential and doesn’t settle on one or the other.