Touched By an Angle (and a Zoom, and Slow Motion...)

I finally saw The Untouchables for the first time, and when it was all done, I thought to myself, "there's a really good movie made really badly."

It started out with a lot of great elements. It was a compelling story, very well written by David Mamet. He managed here to balance telling the tale with his trademarks turns of phrase. There are plenty of lines of dialogue in the movie that have become famous, but they feel very natural in the context of the film.

Things continued to roll on well with most of the casting. Robert De Niro is a great choice for Al Capone. Sean Connery is perfect for Malone, an old beat cop picked to work on the team trying to bring down the gangster. Andy Garcia doesn't have that much to do as another member of the team, but does his part well.

But things start to turn sour with the casting of Kevin Costner. In my opinion, there aren't many actors working today with a more narrow range than Kevin Costner. (Not that he's working all that much today.) His acting runs the gamut from "present" to "mostly present," and he's a very poor choice indeed to lead this team against Capone. He doesn't do "hard boiled cop," nor "tender family man," nor "shrewd detective," nor anything else that would go well in this movie. In every major "two hand" scene in the film, the other actors run rings around him -- De Niro when Eliot Ness confronts Capone, Connery in three or four significant scenes. Costner can't even yell and muster up a convincing level of anger.

And it's pretty much downhill from there. Ennio Morricone provides a bombastic and unsubtle musical score. I suppose that's what you should expect from him, given his body of work, but his use here of synthesized rock percussion doesn't fit the time frame of the movie, while simultaneously dating it in the decade in which it was made. It sweeps when it should play tense, pulses when it should flow... virtually every note is a distracting, sour one.

Yet it's still far less distracting than the work of director Brian De Palma and his cinematographer. The camera work is the heavy-handed technique of people who seem to want you to know just how many tricks are in their arsenal. There are awkward and fast zooms, self-conscious pans, ridiculous slow motion, overt Dutch angles, annoying moments of fake dual focus (through use of a split diopter, for you film buffs), long single takes that call too much attention to themselves... you name it, it's here. This movie should be required viewing in film school, as it shows almost every trick in the book, and how clumsy they all look when they're not employed well.

With all these complaints, you're probably expecting a really low grade from me on this film. But no, I'm actually giving it a B-. That's how good it was on paper; that's how good most of the acting is in this movie. It manages to bubble up to the surface, through the morass trying to drag it under, and still deliver a tale that is entertaining to watch. But it does make me really disappointed to think of how good a movie this could have been in the hands of another director, an "actor's director."

Who knows, the way they seem to keep remaking older movies all the time, maybe I'll get the chance to see in a decade or so.