Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, back in 2019, had the feel of the last time around for Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, making an epic, decades-spanning mob movie one more time, and bringing along old friends Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel. Now, six years later, there’s another last gasp with The Alto Knights, which is an epic mob movie in name only.
Scorsese isn’t involved, nor are any of the other actors besides De Niro, who plays two mid-century mob bosses. In telling the story of friends-turned-foes Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, De Niro plays both parts, roles distinguished mostly by differing facial prosthetics. At no point is the dual-role gimmick successful.
Irwin Winkler, who produced Goodfellas and The Irishman, is on board, as is screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, the Goodfellas/Casino screenwriter who’s 92, with his first produced screenplay since City Hall, in 1996. Winkler is 93, while Barry Levinson, the director, is 82, and De Niro is a comparatively spry 81.
The film, on the surface, feels like the classic movies Pileggi wrote for Scorsese in the 1990s. But it’s missing most of what made those films: grand story arcs, epic rises and falls, memorable scenes, and examinations of the morality of what gangsters are doing. It’s very difficult to make a boring movie about the mafia. But The Alto Knights has managed it.
The plot’s inert and uneventful. The two bosses were friends, and then they were feuding, but Costello spends the majority of the film trying to retire but running into resistance, like the “they pull me back in” arc from The Godfather, Part III. Aside from the usual cliches about the American dream and the government being the real gangsters, the film hasn’t a single notable thing to say about its characters, crime, or how the mobsters of the mid-century fit into the story of those before and after.
Various scenes—a Congressional hearing, a dramatic sit-down, one gangster seen as the more honorable one because he refuses to sell drugs—do little except recall better moments in other, better mob movies. The third act dramatizes the famous Apalachin meeting in 1957, an event that’s not exciting or cinematic.
The screenplay’s poorly structured and confusing: it starts, like Casino, in the middle of the story with an unsuccessful assassination attempt on De Niro’s character, before doubling back. But there’s an additional framing device, with De Niro’s Costello narrating from even further in the future, which accomplishes little besides letting us know that his character will survive through the end of the plot.
One secret to the Scorsese-directed mob pictures was they had great supporting casts. Casino, in particular, stuck either great character actors or famous comedians into almost every supporting role. In Alto Knights, there are a couple of big meetings of mob bosses in which not a single actor of note is even in the room.
Debra Messing and Kathrine Narducci play the two mobsters’ wives, with Messing quiet and Narducci, who played Charmaine Bucco on The Sopranos, just histrionic. She’s one of many Sopranos alumni present, the sort of character actors who typically get parts in a movie like this. But the most prominent other actor from that show is the guy who played Agent Harris (Matt Servitto), who shows up as Costello’s lawyer.