The Alto Knights Review
There’s nothing you haven’t seen before here, and the dual role De Niro plays can at times be distracting; but damn it is great to watch him play a mobster.
Frank Costello (Robert De Niro) is New York City’s crime boss, but his hold as the boss of bosses starts to slip when his childhood friend Vito Genovese (also Robert De Niro) returns from exile and starts upturning the apple cart by trying to sell drugs. Vito’s paranoia leads to an all out feud between the two, and Costello has to try and find a way to save his life, even as its in the hands of a man who is unpredictable as the wind.
The Alto Knights is what one might call extremely ‘serviceable’. There is not a lot of swinging for the fences on display, or anything to really separate it from other gangster fare, other than the casting choice of having De Niro play two characters. What that means is that we have a film that looks fine, sounds fine, and will keep you relatively entertained; but it does come with a decided side helping of deja vu, as you feel you have seen this a million times before.
From a pacing perspective, it all whips by quite nicely. There’s a good mix of dialogue and action for a movie that is primarily about a lot of strategising, and director Barry Levinson balances the few moments of tension well. Levinson also does a great job with making some of the strategising a little obfuscated, which helps something as un-complex as this tale feel a little more involved.
The real drag in this piece is ironically the double De Niro of the whole thing. That’s ironic only really because De Niro is also the best part of the movie. Watching De Niro play a gangster is like watching a master at work, and here we get to see him do it at two speeds; which is great, even if it is like being constantly reminded that you could go watch him do the same thing in better movies instead. But the dual performance bites itself in the butt a little bit, particularly with the prosthetics and makeup on the two. It can be extremely distracting, particularly when he is playing Vito, and really draws you out of the movie. The fact that De Niro’s Vito is pretty much a bang on Joe Pesci impression also makes you wonder constantly why they didn’t just hire a second actor.
