Gangster Squad Review

Everything on screen was borrowed from a better picture, and the borrowing is the entire design. Ruben Fleischer stages 1949 Los Angeles as a run of glossy surfaces, tommy guns in slow motion, Christmas lights, blood on white tablecloths, with Dion Beebe lighting it like a whiskey advertisement. Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen under a prosthetic nose and a permanent snarl, a performance pitched at the back row of a very large theatre.

Josh Brolin's O'Mara speaks almost entirely in mission statements. Gosling makes the one unpredictable choice in the film, a soft, high, faintly bored voice for Jerry Wooters, though it never connects to anything the script asks him to do, and Emma Stone is stranded as the moll passed between the two of them. The best known problem is offscreen.

A shootout staged through the screen of Grauman's Chinese Theatre was cut after the Aurora killings and replaced by a Chinatown sequence, and the seam shows, because the new climax has no geography and no build, just muzzle flare in a place the film has never established. Nick Nolte growls exposition from behind a desk for three scenes and vanishes. Period detail and a body count are standing in for a point of view.