Director: Barry Levinson
Writer: Nicholas Pileggi
Stars: Robert De Niro, Debra Messing, Kathrine Narducci
Synopsis: Two of New York City’s most notorious organized crime bosses vie for control of the city’s streets. Once best friends, petty jealousies and a series of betrayals set them on a deadly collision course.
There will almost never be a time when the prospect of a new movie starring Robert De Niro won’t be a bit enticing for audiences. Despite an incredible and versatile career, spanning decades with movies like The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Untouchables, Goodfellas, A Bronx Tale, Casino and The Irishman (to name only a few), it is wonderful to know that there is more he still has to offer as an actor. It is this knowledge that makes The Alto Knights, a movie starring De Niro in a dual role, all the more interesting a movie at first glance.
Based on true events, De Niro stars as Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, two childhood friends who make their way up the ranks together in the New York crime syndicate. Soon, Genovese even becomes the head of the syndicate for a while, but, after he murders someone and flees the country, Frank takes over. Years later, Vito returns and wants his power back, leading to escalating tensions and even an assassination attempt on Frank, and the two former best friends now find themselves becoming enemies, ultimately resulting in a rivalry that could potentially decimate the entire New York mafia.
Despite the movie releasing now in theaters, The Alto Knights was a pitch that spent years gathering dust on the shelf, as many studios were offered the movie, but everyone passed on it. In 2022, however, newly appointed CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav, personally greenlit the project, with Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam) tapped to direct, with a script from Nicholas Pileggi, most notable for writing Goodfellas. When a team of such talents is brought together, one might expect that the end result might be something quite extraordinary. Unfortunately, The Alto Knights plays a lot like a watered down version of The Irishman, down to the events of the movie being narrated by De Niro playing Frank Costello in his twilight years, except this time, most of the interesting moments are shown through a slideshow rather than actual scenes.
Where The Alto Knights succeeds is, as expected, with De Niro. As an actor who has established himself as one of the greatest to ever live, he once again proves he has a versatile range with two very different performances between Costello and Genovese, showcased rather spectacularly when the two eventually come face-to-face in a pivotal moment of the movie and try to figure out how to stop a war from igniting between them, somewhat reminiscent of the famous diner sequence between Al Pacino and De Niro in Heat. Backed with some good supporting performances from Debra Messing, Katherine Narducci and an unrecognizable Cosmo Jarvis, the movie excels in this department often.
Unfortunately, that is also where the praise mostly subsides. Despite some strong dialogue exchanges between characters, particularly a court standoff between De Niro and Narducci, much of the movie’s intrigue is built on layers of exposition that jumble the narrative quite often, and makes the proceedings feel less like a movie made for theaters and more like an old news segment that is recounting a moment in time, with some incredibly choppy editing and odd fade outs that continually break the flow of the movie. The rushed nature of many scenes, which could have been engrossing, are shown through the slideshow, which results in a sluggish pace with the rest of the movie, making it feel far longer than the aforementioned The Irishman, which is 92 minutes longer.
The story of The Alto Knights and how the New York mafia crumbled due to the rivalry between Costello and Genovese is a fascinating one, and there are hints of it scattered throughout the runtime, but it comes up short often due to a lack of momentum and even a surprising amount of tired narrative tropes revisited from far more effective movies in the genre. Were it not for De Niro’s performances and some solid work from the rest of the cast, The Alto Knights would fall apart entirely. Despite them, however, the movie feels like it was shelved this entire time for a reason.
