The Alto Knights (2025)

After mob boss Vito (Robert De Niro with loads of facial prosthetics) gets into a scrape with the authorities, he has to flee the USA and leave his childhood friend and business partner Frank (Robert De Niro without augmentation) in charge of things. Many years go by and the latter makes a success of the post prohibition business, avoiding the narcotics industry and keeping the peace amongst the other families that control the boroughs of New York. Then Vito decides he wants to come home and resume his position at the top of the tree, but being quite a loose cannon finds that Frank and just about everyone else isn’t so keen on that proposal. True to form, Vito decides to make his presence felt and things start to become pretty precarious for Frank. That only gets more serious when the Feds and the US Senate decide to conduct a crackdown on the burgeoning drugs trade that Vito is seeing as a future way to make millions of dollars. In the end, Frank is going to have to make some tough decisions. Now, aside from the skills of the make-up artists who have managed to make one De Niro look authentic and the other like someone from a Jim Henson movie, the rest of this is a pretty poorly paced and shallow gangster movie with a great deal of chatting and virtually no action aside from the opening scene and a very messy haircut later on. His solution is, historically, quite quirky but the rest of this is procedural and I thought really rather dull as it bounces us around the timelines of their lives, loves and fairly ruthless business tactics before rushing us through who did what to whom as the story rather fizzles out. It’s all a pretty weak style over substance exercise that sees it’s lacklustre star woodenly going through the motions leading a supporting cast that adds very little to the whole thing as it lumbers along stylishly, but unremarkably. Nobody’s finest work, sorry.