Gangster Squad | A Hidden Gem?

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]You're certifiable, Mickey. You belong in the booby hatch, eating pudding in your god damn pajamas.

[00:00:06]A minute ago you were begging. That's what I thought you were a man, but you're something else.

[00:00:11]You're rotten.

[00:00:26]Welcome back to another gangster movie review. If you're new to the channel, be sure to check out my playlist on gangster film reviews, where we take a look at well-known crime films like Scarface, Gangs of New York, and Carlito's Way, more obscure films like Gangster No. 1, The Death Collector, and Chicago Overcoat, and downright terrible crime flicks like Capone, This Thing of Ours, and Mob Town. Feel free to subscribe and hit the notification bell if you like what you see, and consider becoming a patron or channel member to support the channel and get early access to videos. Today, we're going to be taking a look at a film that came and went pretty quickly, 2013's Gangster Squad, starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Emma Stone, Michael Peña, Robert Patrick, Giovanni Ribisi, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Nick Nolte had a small role as the gruff police captain.

[00:01:19]I want to talk to you about the war for the soul of Los Angeles. The film is set in 1949 Los Angeles. The ruthless mob boss, Mickey Cohen, played by Sean Penn, is expanding his criminal empire and trying to take control of the city through drugs, gambling, prostitution, and corruption. He has cops and judges on his payroll, making him practically untouchable for honest, square-jawed cop Josh Brolin, who plays Sergeant John O'Mara.

[00:01:50]Police Chief Bill Parker secretly orders Sergeant John O'Mara to put together an off-the-books team to harass and dismantle Cohen's operation. O'Mara recruits a small group of officers with different skills, including Jerry Wooters, played by Gosling, a smooth and somewhat reckless cop who is also romantically involved with Grace Faraday, Cohen's girlfriend. If we succeed, nobody will ever know what we've done.

[00:02:16]No medals, no promotion, but I'm here to tell you there's death in it waiting for the man who hesitates.

[00:02:25]The squad starts hitting Cohen's businesses hard. Instead of arresting him directly, they sabotage shipments, raid operations, and cut into his income. Their attacks start to weaken his grip on the city, and Cohen becomes increasingly paranoid as he realizes someone is targeting him from inside Los Angeles law enforcement, when he thought he had the entire department bought and paid off. I remember years back when Gangster Squad first came out, and as a big crime movie fan, I had absolutely no interest in watching it. It came out at a time when the mafia movie landscape was a barren wasteland. The '90s had been the peak of crime movies. Films like Casino, Heat, Donnie Brasco, and Goodfellas were being fired out of Hollywood.

[00:03:08]But since the turn of the century, it felt like movies were slowly getting worse and worse, and no genre was perhaps more representative of this than the gangster movie, which died a frustrating death, as did the careers of many associated with the genre, like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and others. De Niro and Pacino having pained me with their Righteous Kill outing.

[00:03:31]There's only really a handful of Hollywood gangster movies from the 2000s that are good. I enjoyed American Gangster, Road to Perdition is good, there's The Departed, of course, but after that, what really is there? Public Enemies was a borefest. Find Me Guilty is decent, but it's a comedy.

[00:03:48]There was a sudden burst of British crime films in the early 2000s, like Snatch and Layer Cake, but in all honesty, as a mafia movie connoisseur, I was starving.

[00:03:58]So, is it any wonder then that when I saw the trailer for Gangster Squad that I was completely turned off by it? It looked like it contained everything I hated about modern movies at the time.

[00:04:07]Bland dialogue, cardboard cutout characters, an ugly, dreary, overcast color palette for a time period that should be really glitzy and good-looking. Sean Penn looking like Freddy Krueger, dialogue scenes that look like placeholders to quickly get to the action scenes, cinematography that was clearly shot digitally instead of on film, which I felt like all period movies should be shot on, CGI backgrounds, and just an overall infantilization of film itself in that gangster films used to be serious. They had great characters. They had something to say about society. They tapped into darker elements of our psyche.

[00:04:45]This just looked dumb, uninspired, and by the numbers. Yeah, but he's heard everything.

[00:04:51]Yeah, I know your plan.

[00:04:53]That's what I just said.

[00:04:55]There's also something else about the film that annoyed me. There was a big scene from the film, in fact, I think it's supposed to be the film's climax, where a big shootout occurs at a movie theater. But in 2012, there was a real-life mass shooting in an Aurora, Colorado theater showing of The Dark Knight Rises in which a gunman opened fired at an audience and took out about a dozen people. Now, I understand that it's a deeply tragic event, but when news came out that the big climax of Gangster Squad was scrapped as a result of this incident and the shootout scene reshot to take place in a Chinatown market, I was pretty miffed.

[00:05:31]It felt like to me that the artistic integrity of the movie was being compromised, its vision stifled for something it really had nothing to do with. Like, yes, there's been a shooting in a movie theater, but there's been many tragic events that have occurred in many places and many times. If we were to cut in act scenes from films because of stuff that really happens, we'd be left with nothing but a few scenes of Steven Seagal beating people up. And where exactly do we draw the line if changing films is the right thing to do?

[00:06:00]How long would the filmmakers be allowed to wait until they could include a theater shootout in the film? Because another thing is that movies are timeless. Gangster Squad still exists in 2026.

[00:06:13]And there will be people who watch it who know nothing about the Colorado shooting. Gangster Squad exists in Lithuania, in Gambia, heck in New York, which is miles away from Colorado. What purpose does it really serve to change the film because of a shooting that happened?

[00:06:28]In any case, for the sake of my gangster movie review series, I decided to give the film a watch. And I got to be honest, I actually really enjoyed it. It isn't a masterpiece by any means.

[00:06:40]But for what it clearly set out to do, I think it fulfilled its purpose. We're standing in the middle of a money-making machine.

[00:06:48]Makes me giddy. I got to give a disclaimer of course that I went in literally expecting to rip it apart. And I watched it on a day where I was kind of pissed off, and I just wanted to get away from the world and immerse myself into a film for a few hours.

[00:07:02]So, I appreciate if you went to the cinema to watch it with the idea you'd be watching a big epic crime film, and you were left with a bad taste, you're not going to be partial to looking back on the film as favorably. You got to go in knowing it's a wacky throwback to film noir. Think of it maybe as an action film with a noir coat. Many complaints people might have about the film make sense as a result. Noir had stock characters, clichéd plots, and was told in an exaggerated larger-than-life way.

[00:07:32]And Gangster Squad is adept at emulating classic noir elements. Josh Brolin is the tough but honest leading man.

[00:07:38]Gosling is the suave wild card detective. Emma Stone is the female fatale and Penn is the big loudmouth pantomime villain. YOU [ __ ] YOU WON'T FIGHT THE [ __ ] SUCKERS THAT DID THIS TO ME! YOU WON'T FIGHT THEM! THE FILM MOVES FAST and doesn't burden itself with over complications. Instead, it's telling a simple story of a bad guy who's got to get got. So, we're assembling a team to go after him and it's fun. I know that word, fun, is often used when you want to say you know a film is [ __ ] but you liked it and maybe that's the case.

[00:08:14]But, Gangster Squad has a lightness and an energy to it that was engaging. It was like the L.A. Noire game come to life. I liked being with the Gangster Squad team. I found them really likable.

[00:08:24]Now, I've run with a lot of officers but none better than you group of misfits.

[00:08:31]Cheers. Cheers. To the Gangster Squad.

[00:08:33]The Gangster Squad.

[00:08:35]I could envision them going on different adventures in a TV show, raiding way houses, chasing down bootleggers, jumping from rooftops to rooftops, all while the 60s Batman theme song follows them around. The film was like a wacky retelling of Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, which in of itself was heightened and stylized. It's nowhere near as grim as I was expecting it to be. MORE WILL NOW BE DONE.

[00:09:03]That didn't work. It never leans too far into the silliness where it just descends into a farce. So, it remains engaging even if you've seen all of these characters a hundred of times before. There's a vibe it manages to just about capture, a vibe which is surprisingly hard to do, of balancing humor and sincere emotion.

[00:09:22]Maybe I'm losing my touch, but I actually had a great time with the action scenes, too. There's a few hokey moments, like this weird tracking effect in this elevator fight, and what seems to be bizarre freeze frames during the jailhouse fight, unless there was just something up with my copy of the film.

[00:09:37]And occasionally, you get cookie shots like this CGI camera work of Ryan Gosling shooting from the car, but overall, there was a refreshing use of real cars, practical effects, and real muzzle flash to keep the action entertaining.

[00:09:51]>> LIGHT THEM UP.

[00:09:59]ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? WE GET SOME NICE SHOOTOUTS AND CAR CHASES, including guys hanging out of classic cars going at it against each other with Tommy guns.

[00:10:07]That's the kind of stuff I was expecting in Michael Mann's Public Enemies, his biopic of bank robber John Dillinger.

[00:10:14]But that film, as I mentioned in my review of it, though having more panache and aura about it, it was just boring. Gangster Squad is clearly more lowbrow, but I did not feel like I wasted my hour and 45 minutes.

[00:10:27]It's hard to describe, but action movie fans will know what I'm talking about when I say there's a certain thirst that's quenched when watching a really good action scene, a dopamine rush that leaves you satisfied. And this is one such film that quenches that thirst.

[00:10:51]Of course, just because a film entertains you, that isn't to say it doesn't have flaws. As I suspected when I watched the film's trailer, I really did not like the look of the movie.

[00:11:01]There's something really fake and ugly about it. Like the color palette was just orange and grime. Take this scene where the guys are doing shooting practice. Everything looks an odd shade of this kind of icky sepia yellowy orange. The environment looks orange.

[00:11:16]The white guys look orange. The brown guy looks orange. The black guy looks orange. And sometimes the characters look straight up weird. Take a look at this scene. Surely I can't be the only one who thinks Nick Nolte looks like he's out of a really good video game cutscene. If the film was made today, I think it could even be accused of being made by AI in places. We need to offer Cohen no quarter. I'm not a quarter kind of guy, sir.

[00:11:40]Neither am I.

[00:11:42]I think you can separate the film into two sections.

[00:11:46]The scenes that follow the Gangster Squad, very fun and easy to watch. And the scenes where we follow Sean Penn as Mickey Cohen. The film is basically made up of the Gangster Squad doing their thing, intercut with Cohen going ballistic and shouting at everyone, killing underlings for screwing up. Sean Penn is loud in the film. He's full of energy. He's abrasive, but he just isn't very good. Much like how Robert De Niro is loud and flamboyant Al Capone in The Untouchables perhaps should have worked on paper given the tone of the film, but didn't quite hit the mark. It's like Penn knew what kind of film it was, so tried to deliver the appropriate level of camp, but his natural inclination to provide a more weighty role was seeped through, and his performance was caught somewhere in between.

[00:12:31]Ultimately, I just didn't think he was very good, and he came off as too try-hard. Kill them all.

[00:12:39]Kill their families.

[00:12:41]Their kids. And because this is my destiny. Los Angeles is my [ __ ] destiny, you [ __ ] You kind of roll your eyes when he comes on screen because you know it's going to play out with him seething with rage after hearing bad news, then going ballistic and shouting something about being the top dog. Plus, I don't know why they had Penn under so much makeup. He looked like a reanimated corpse wearing a mask at times.

[00:13:06]It must be said, in correlation with the movie having a more hammy vibe than you'd expect, the film does contain considerable departures from real-life events, if that's going to end up annoying you. In Gangster Squad, the unit is formed to bring down Mickey Cohen directly. In reality, Chief Parker created the real Gangster Squad for a different reason, to keep other criminals from moving in on Cohen's operations after he was sent to prison for income tax evasion.

[00:13:33]When the squad got word that gangsters from outside Los Angeles were coming in to start new rackets, they would reportedly abduct them, rough them up, with some accounts alleging torture, and send them packing with a clear threat not to come back.

[00:13:47]The film also changes Jack O'Mara's involvement from the real-life events.

[00:13:52]O'Mara, played by Josh Brolin, physically confronts Mickey Cohen at the end of the film, having a fistfight, and he then arrests him for murder. In real life, Cohen's downfall came through a tax evasion case, not a murder arrest.

[00:14:06]And by the time Cohen went to prison in 1961, the actual Jack O'Mara had already retired and attended the trial as a private citizen.

[00:14:14]So, the film does play fast and loose with the truth, but all in all, I had a good time with it, and I consider it a fun way to burn an afternoon.

[00:14:23]What do you make of Gangster Squad? Let me know in the comments section below.

[00:14:26]Subscribe to the channel, and thanks for watching.