“Gangster Squad” is more “Scarface” than “Dragnet”
Sean Penn blasts his way across the screen as showman/gangster Mickey Cohen in “Gangster Squad,” a post-World War II crime drama about the quest to arrest the extremely bright and equally lethal mobster.
When the film was released Jan. 11, many observers predicted that the $60 million crime picture, co-starring Josh Brolin, Anthony Mackie, Michael Pena and Ryan Gosling as Los Angeles detectives blasted by Cohen and his crew, would be a hit.
It wasn’t.
The R-rated film earned a modest $46 million in the U.S. and Canada and faded away in a sea of bad reviews. “Gangster Squad” ($28.99, DVD; $35.99, Blu-ray Disc; April 23) appears destined to do much better on disc and digital download as fans of the film applaud its over-the-top mood, which puts it closer in tone to “Scarface” than “Dragnet.”
Set in 1949 Los Angeles, “Gangster Squad” introduces Cohen as a Brooklyn-born mob chief moving to California to enjoy the profits made from drugs, guns and prostitutes and then claim the city as his own. The criminal soon goes head-to-head with Sgt. John O’Mara (Brolin), a no-nonsense cop given a secret squad and some loose-cannon cops to help him eliminate the resourceful Cohen.
Directed by promising talent Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”), “Gangster Squad,” which is based on Paul Lieberman’s seven-part 2008 Los Angeles Times series on Cohen and the cops who brought him down, climaxes with a brutal fistfight between the characters played by Brolin and Penn. The bone-breaking scene, Brolin said on the Screen Rant website, consisted of a fight with few pulled punches.
“It was a tough fight that we rehearsed for many, many weeks,” Brolin said. “I love the way that it turned out, but I think both of us, being the current and ex-smokers that we are, that was the most challenging on an oxygen level.
“We did the fight sequences at night, usually starting at midnight and until 6 a.m., and we didn’t use stunt doubles. They (the fights) were incredibly brutal.”
The Blu-ray versions of “Gangster Squad” include almost two hours of bonus features. They include commentary by Fleischer, a background piece (“The Gangland Files”), a biography (“Rogues Gallery: Mickey Cohen”), a featurette on the fashions of the 1940s (“Tough Guys With Style”), and deleted scenes.
And what about Cohen? He died in 1976 behind bars.