Gangs of New York (2002) Review

Gangs of New York is directed by one of my favourite directors Martin Scorsese and has a stellar cast with Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day Lewis, Cameron Diaz, John C Reilly, and Liam Neeson. The story is about two gangs who fought in the past with one of them defeating the other, and know the son of the father who led the gang many years later comes back to avenge the father.

Now there are good thing about the film, but these good thing are outweighed by the bad (unfortunately). With the film being nearly 3 hours long, the film felt like it was three hours long, and sometimes that is not a good thing. To me the film kept on dragging and dragging, when it just did not have to. With a director of Martin Scorsese’s integrity, three hours, a stellar cast and a film about gangs should have been a walk in the park, but it wasn't. The acting wasn't great, it was really average (except for Daniel Day Lewis but we’ll come to that later), no one blew me away. And when I can say that Leonardo DiCaprio could have been replaced in the film and still would not have made a difference then we know that the film is not going to be great. Other problems with the film was its pace. Martin Scorsese usually gets the pace perfect with everything flowing, but in this film the pacing was off. It felt like too much time was dedicated to Leo’s character (Amsterdam Vallon) building trust to Daniel Day Lewis’ character (Bill Cutting), and the time was wasted. Do not get me wrong, building the relationship is necessary but not when it take a big chunk of the film. I felt only three characters were developed while the rest were there to fill in spaces for the film and those three characters were Leonardo DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon), Daniel Day Lewis (Bill Cutting), and Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdean). Everyone else was left out.

Now let’s talk about the good, Daniel Day Lewis. His performance was outstanding, to me, he was the only one putting in real effort and it paid off. Every single time he was on the screen I could not take my eyes away, the guy stole every scene, even the ones where he’s in there for a few seconds. He just had a presence that just made me respect his acting. I cannot fault his performance as he dragged the film to make it more interesting than it was. My hat goes off to him.    

This review might seem a hate fest towards Gangs of New York, but there were scenes where I enjoyed the film (especially if it had Day Lewis), I liked the concept of the film, not the most original but I liked the concept but this film is not the best Scorsese film compared to his other classics. This will be a film that you will forget once you have watched it, and it unfortunately deserves an average of 6/10