The Alto Knights review – if it ain’t broke…

Robert De Niro is undoubtedly one of the greats, but even though the scales tip heavily in his filmography’s favour alongside the perfectly modulated turns in Scorsese or Coppola classics there is still unignorable tosh with painfully unfunny nonsense or brazen geezer teasers. His latest, The Alto Knights, from the semi-legendary filmmaking figure Barry Levinson, strikes somewhere in between. While it’s unsubtle, predictable, and nothing we haven’t seen from both in far superior films, it’s also kind of a hoot.

De Niro plays two legendary gangsters, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who can be most easily distinguished as the one with a fake pointy nose and the one who seems to have nicked Colin Farrell’s prosthetics from The Penguin. Frank is the more level-headed of the crime bosses, having sustained decades of relative peace across the mafia, playing by their self-enforced rules, schmoozing and paying off enough politicians and law enforcement to keep everyone happy and his beloved wife and puppies luxuriating in diamonds and minks. But when his old pal Vito returns from self-imposed exile in Europe, his approach proves too ruthless, and the pair enter a passive-aggressive parasitic relationship, where one can only thrive if the other withers.

The film largely centers around the real-life events of 1957, where their rivalry came to a head, and then flashes backwards and forwards to contextualize the falling out. This is punctuated by the truly puzzling choice of having De Niro’s Frank break the fourth wall to stare down the camera and explain precisely what is going on, often just recapping the prior scene or reminding us of characters’ names. There’s a sense that this was made with a second screen in mind, and Levinson et al. have a complete lack of faith in their audience’s attention span.

In a further strike against it, none of the supporting characters are given much to do beyond truly embarrassing turns from Debra Messing as Frank’s wife and Cosmo Jarvis as a mob heavy. Messing’s one note is just saying all lines assertively, while Jarvis seems just as confused as anyone as to why he’s in this film. And that lack of attention and care to anything beyond De Niro abounds. To quote Clueless, when it comes to the compositions of the shots, the production design, and the costuming, it’s “a full-on Monet” ie.“From far away it’s okay, but up close it’s a big old mess.”

But once you get used to some of its perplexing choices, there’s fun to be had here. De Niro has delicious chemistry with himself, which becomes more amusing when imagining how he would have been performing these duologues to an empty void. The film is far better when it leans into similar flights of absurdity, with mob leaders fleeing crime scenes with a shrimp cocktail too good to leave behind, debating the origins of Mormonism’s golden tablets, or coaxing a spoiled Pomeranian into a stroll. As the inevitable plot beats slowly unspool, there’s a strange comfort in its predictability and De Niro’s gentle comic timing while rhapsodising about upstate New York’s apples. And while this film won’t go down as one of the greats, it’s certainly not sullying anyone’s legacy.