‘The Alto Knights’ is nothing but a faint echo of a once revered genre

PHOENIX (AZFamily) — Can knights be made men?

Synopsis

Based on true events, The Alto Knights recounts the story of Italian-American mob bosses Frank Costello (Robert De Niro) and Vito Genovese (Robert De Niro) as they both come to the end of their criminal careers. When Costello decides to retire and eventually testify at a hearing, Genovese puts out a hit. The hit fails, but it fractures Costello’s and Genovese’s relationship, as well as their overall relationship with the Mafia.

My thoughts

If one were to look at the poster for The Alto Knights, you’d notice some big names and movie titles listed there. Robert De Niro is on there (twice), and the tagline says, “From the hitmakers who brought you Goodfellas, The Irishman, and Bugsy.” I think “hitmakers” is supposed to be some sort of Mafia pun, but it’s really just a sly way for the people who made the tagline to tiptoe around the fact that this isn’t really a Martin Scorsese picture, even if it has the walk and talk of one, only none of the style or swagger.

Yep, it’s all just a trick. It’s a dirty trick to remind you of far better movies, so you think this new one might be anywhere near up to snuff. This isn’t just Robert De Niro playing a mobster again, but we have Barry Levinson directing his first film in a decade and returning to the gangster genre after Bugsy in 1991. Other mob movie veterans involved are author and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, who has been penning his first theatrical feature-length screenplay since 1996, and producer Irwin Winkler, who produced Goodfellas and The Irishman.

Remembering the good old days

As Al Pacino once said, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” He was lucky to avoid being involved in The Alto Knights, but I can’t say the same for Levinson and Pileggi. Pileggi’s script, then titled Wise Guys, has been kicking around Hollywood since the 70s, with producer Irwin Winkler eagerly trying to get it made while studio head after studio head at Warners Bros. passed it over as the decades went on.

Well, good for Irwin Winkler that current WB boss David Zaslav is buddies with Pileggi, which is pretty much the only reason The Alto Knights finally exists. Because of this five-decade gestation period, I’m sure the script for Wise Guys, which would eventually turn into The Alto Knights, was revised numerous times before production commenced. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t think any number of revisions could make Pileggi’s script fresh or compelling.

Now, Pileggi is responsible for co-writing Goodfellas and Casino, so he’s responsible alongside Martin Scorsese for basically setting the template for the modern gangster movie. The Alto Knights pretty much follow the same formula as Goodfellas and Casino. Like the main characters there, De Niro’s Frank Costello narrates the events over his years in the criminal underworld, accompanied by numerous montages with fast-tempo music.

Another example of retreading old ground is the relationship between Costello and Genovese. It’s very reminiscent of the relationship between De Niro and Joe Pesci in Casino where they’re thick as thieves business partners who eventually have a falling out. There’s no real dramatic tension to any of this since we know from the get-go Genovese put out the hit out on Costello, as the opening of the film shows this before flashing back to when things are all hunky-dory.

Therefore, The Alto Knights floats around in this weird limbo where it’s both the most generic cliché filled mobster movie imaginable, but it’s written by the guy who helped establish many of those clichés. So, it’s almost as if Pileggi is ripping off himself, and like any rip-off, it’s all just a pale imitation of something that’s originally filled with vibrant color. No matter which way you look at it, Pileggi is far past his prime, just like everyone else who worked on this.

It’s not just derivative, but feels lazy and cheap overall. Barry Levinson hasn’t directed a film in a decade and it shows, seemingly coasting through the filmmaking process here. The narrative feels so sluggish and meandering, with hardly any forward momentum. It certainly doesn’t help when Levinson didn’t seem to bother shooting any connective tissue to tie the scenes together, having to resort to an archive of old photos and videos or intertitles where they couldn’t even be bothered to change the default font in the editing software’s title maker.

Doubling down on De Niro

This is one of those movies where I genuinely felt bad for the editor, as I can only imagine the amount of hair editor Douglas Crise pulled out of his head when trying to cobble this mess together. There are so many scenes where characters just ramble on and on with each other, and then it awkwardly fades to black, followed by fading into a totally different conversation in a totally different location.

One could excuse the many fades to black in The Alto Knights as being an homage to how older films were shot and edited with long takes and fade transitions, but it’s clear that Levinson and Pileggi lacked any sort of concrete vision with this. It’s all a far cry from what Scorsese and his go to editor Thelma Schoonmaker (the GOAT film editor, if you ask me) would have been able to do with this material. There’s simply no flow or energy to be found here.

I’m not saying Martin Scorsese is the only filmmaker capable of making a good mobster movie, but he’s sort of solidified himself as the king of the genre, and so many movies in it have ridden on his coattails. Not to mention that it really felt like Scorsese put the whole Mafia genre to rest with The Irishman, which was musing on the entire genre and Scorsese’s, De Niro’s, Pacino’s, and Joe Pesci’s career as a whole. There’s just no reason to keep making movies like this anymore.

We get double the De Niro’s here, where he plays both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese in this, and I’m still confused why he’s playing two different characters. Normally, an actor is cast in two roles to play twins, siblings, clones, or two characters who would logically look alike, but here? It just seemed pointless and like some cheap way to get around paying another legendary mob movie actor to act against him.

De Niro is at least pretty solid in both roles. He may be a little hammy at times, but he’s definitely not phoning it in. The script and direction don’t allow De Niro to go to the depths like he was able to go to in The Irishman (which should have been huis, but he’s putting in the effort. He does enough with the characterization of both Costello and Genovese to give them distinct personalities, so you’re never really confused about who’s who, but the double casting is still an odd (i.e. cheap) decision.

On the other hand, Debra Messing, who plays Frank’s wife, Bobbie, is downright awful. Pileggi and Levinson attempt to give her a bit more agency than your usual mob wife stereotype, but Messing’s line delivery, particularly her hokey accent, were all over the place. Her character doesn’t even get a satisfying resolution, which goes for the entire movie, really, where Levinson and Pileggi decide to use blatant voiceover exposition instead of actually showing any sort of interesting character-building.

Final verdict

With Robert De Niro narrating The Alto Knights, I can’t think of a more fitting framing device for a movie that’s all about reliving the glory days made by guys who are trying to relive their own glory days by making pale imitations of their iconic works. This is a mob movie through and through with all the prerequisite clichés, but that’s all they are at this point: clichés that remind you of much better movies (aka the glory days).

It’s all kind of sad, though. People like Robert De Niro, Barry Levinson, Nicholas Pileggi, and Irwin Winkler are all accomplished artists who have created their own distinct legacies. To continue to add blemishes to those legacies when they can just retire and rest on their laurels is something I’ll never understand from any artist of any medium or genre. Is it all for the love of the craft, or just the love of one’s own self? Perhaps, like the De Niro duo here, it’s a little bit of both.