The Alto Knights review: two De Niro’s can’t save criminally boring gangster movie

Robert De Niro adds another gangster movie to his resume with The Alto Knights, but perhaps he would have been better served to let this one sleep with the fishes. Though the movie, based on the true story of notorious mobsters Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, has quite the crew, including De Niro giving two performances, an Oscar-winning director (Barry Levinson) and the writer of Goodfellas (Nicholas Pileggi), this is a sorry, boring effort that is best forgotten.

The movie chronicles the relationship between Costello and Genovese (both played by De Niro), two of New York’s most notorious crime bosses. While much of the movie is set in the late 50s, it tries to fill audiences in with nearly 50 years of personal and mob history. Despite that, it feels like very little happens in the movie, or at least very little that is actually interesting.

One of the more “exciting” scenes in the entire movie is Costello giving testimony to Congress as they attempt to crack down on organized crime, but it’s not like that will get your adrenaline pumping. Then the movie’s dramatic climax is about as far away from a shootout as you can get.

Of course, you don’t always need violence to satisfy audiences, even in a gangster movie. But the ground work that was needed to pull off these more low-stake moments to be the pinnacle of the movie was not properly laid out or executed well enough.

While a lot of that does fall on a script that just doesn’t have the juice, it also falls on Levinson as the director. Levinson has shown to be able to make effective movies without violence or action (he won an Oscar for the Best Picture winner Rain Man), which is why it is so disappointing that nearly every choice he makes here feels wrong. The movie uses a mish-mash of techniques that don’t feel natural, including Costello narrating in voice over and telling the story directly to the camera, fade outs, flashbacks and more. It feels like they threw the kitchen sink at this movie to try and give it a boost, but nothing works.

The lone saving grace for The Alto Knights is De Niro, who is able to give two solid performances as the opposing mob bosses. It’s intriguing to see De Niro play both the wild, loose cannon and the more subdued, calculating persona in the same movie, and he’s effective in both roles. Oddly, perhaps the weakest part of his work is when De Niro acts opposite himself. Together it’s harder to distinguish the two performances (no favors were done with how these scenes were scripted). It seems clear that even one of the greatest actors of all time is better served when he has an actual co-star he can act opposite of instead of movie trickery.

While some notable names (Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis) and recognizable faces (especially to those familiar with the gangster genre) populate the rest of the cast, no one else is able to stand out (a lone exception might be Michael Rispoli, who has one strong scene).

There’s one sequence in the movie where a scene with Genovese is intercut with clips from White Heat (which Costello is watching a preview for on the TV). I would recommend you simply go watch White Heat, a classic gangster movie, instead of The Alto Knights.

But if you choose to watch The Alto Knights, it is playing exclusively in movie theaters right now.