Blu-Ray Review: 'Ultimate Gangster Collection: Contemporary'

As a kid “Top Gun” told me I should to be a fighter pilot, James Bond movies showed me how awesome it is to be a spy, and gangster movies made me want to be a gangster and live a life outside the law. None of those career options panned out, but to celebrate the long, illustrious history of mobsters in cinema, Warner Bros. has released their “Ultimate GangsterCollection” so you can live vicariously through some of he all-time fiercest movie criminals in history.

'Jack The Giant Slayer' Movie Review

“Jack the Giant Slayer” seeks to answer that age-old question, that query that has dogged mankind since the beginning of time: who would win a tug-of-war match between humans and giants? Who says Hollywood is afraid to make a movie about important topics? But while director Bryan Singer may momentarily probe that deep, dark mystery near the climax, the film is an empty shell, a blatant attempt to infuse the “Jack and the Beanstalk” story with a grandiose “Lord of the Rings” scale, and there is very little to recommend it.

'Gangster Squad' Movie Review

“Gangster Squad” is a film a lot of people may take the wrong way. Most of us thought we were in store for a gritty, violent gangster pic, and while there is plenty of brutality—one of the first things you see is a pair of cars rip a guy in half, and coyotes feasting on his innards—that’s not exactly what you get. What director Ruben Fleisher (“Zombieland”) delivers is more of a period melodrama that just happens to tell a gangster story. Full of action, it’s also a damn lot of cartoonish fun for a while, like a blood soaked “Dick Tracy”. “Gangster Squad” plays out like a light movie serial, but at the end of the day, however, you want there to be something more.

'Killing Them Softly' Movie Review

 

The last time star Brad Pitt and writer/director Andrew Dominik teamed up was for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”. That film is a long, slow burn; drifting in and out of scenes, dream like at times. Despite the gradual, deliberate pace, there is a force behind the narrative. Their latest endeavor, “Killing Them Softly”, an adaptation of George V. Higgins’ novel “Cogan’s Trade”, aims for the same goal. This time, however, they miss the mark, and instead of a steady, measured tempo, the film sags and meanders. It goes nowhere, and in the end, even though the story reaches the only logical conclusion, it peters out and leaves you empty.

DVD/Blu-ray Review: 'Kill the Irishman'

The Movie:

“Kill the Irishman” tells the true-life story of Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson), a legendary Cleveland gangster and folk hero. In the 1970s Greene and a rag tag group of modern day Celtic warriors waged war against the Italian mob in Northern Ohio. The most obvious comparison for “Irishman” is “Goodfellas”, another film that traces the rise of a figure in organized crime from childhood, through the early stages of his criminal career, into the glory days, and his ultimate downfall. Green was most notable for being the man the mob couldn’t kill. Seriously, the guy was like a freaking cat he had so many lives. At one point a house falls on him and he walks away unscathed. He survives bullets, stabbings, and car bombs. Bombs are the apparent weapon of choice in this particular region, and in one summer, no less than 36 go off. There is a pretty amazing montage of exploding automobiles.