Review #1,341: 'The Godfather Part III' (1990)

The status of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II as two of the greatest movies ever made meant that Part III, made 16 years after the previous instalment, was always going to be in for a rough ride if it turned out to be anything other than perfection. Of course, it wasn't, and the film has since been considered as something of the deformed runt of the litter ever since. 28 years have now passed since director Francis Ford Coppola and writer Mario Puzo drew the curtains on the Corleone family legacy, which is ample time to set aside the anger and frustration generated after the original viewing and reevaluate it objectively. Is it anything near as bad as the film's reputation would suggest? No, not at all.

The story picks up in 1979, with Don Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) seeking legitimacy for his family business and moving out of the murky criminal underworld he has spent most of his adult life dwelling in. To do this, he strikes a deal with Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly) to pay off his astronomic debt in exchange for shares in an international real estate company, making him the largest shareholder as a result. Meanwhile, the bastard son of Michael's brother Sonny, Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), has returned home to offer his services, and to justify his beef with the ambitious boss of the Corleone's New York operations, Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna). Michael agrees to take the young hot-head under his wing, but Vincent starts to develop feelings for his cousin - and Michael's daughter - Mary (Sofia Coppola).

Many of the complaints aimed at the film usually involve the overly bleak tone, a confusing and slow-moving plot, and the performance of Sofia Coppola, and these are all completely justified. Coppola and Puzo's decision to move the main action away from the mob's dirty dealings and their individual attempts to grab power to rambling conversations and business speak with the Catholic Church understandably isolated a huge chunk of the core fan-base. An already-dull story isn't helped when it's difficult to grasp exactly what's going on. And Sofia Coppola really is terrible. Her decision to make the switch from actor to director was the best decision she could have made, and we've had the pleasures of The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation as a result. Her relationship with Vincent is key to the movie's themes, but their scenes play out in spectacularly bland fashion.

Yet there is still plenty to savour in The Godfather Part III.  Where it fails in the quieter moments to make its central story involving corruption within the Church remotely engaging, the set-pieces are still immaculately crafted, something of a Godfather staple. The climax gradually builds the tension to an unbearable level, and there's a nice moment during a crowded street festival involving Vincent and Joey. There's also the other performances, with Pacino delivering one of finest of his career, and Talia Shire and Diane Keaton injecting real emotion in their roles of sister and ex-wife, respectively. This is Michael at his most guilt-ridden and tortured, as he reflects on a life built on the blood of others during his savage quest for power, including of course, his own brother Fredo. Pacino really excels here, as he portrays a man distracted by melancholia and seeking any kind of redemption for his past actions. This will always be the unwanted stepchild of The Godfather trilogy, but go into it with an open mind and you may find that it's much better than you remembered.


Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Andy Garcia, Eli Wallach, Joe Mantegna, Sofia Coppola, George Hamilton, Bridget Fonda
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #1,301: 'Geostorm' (2017)

It's been happening to major releases for decades, but nowadays near enough every big-budget blockbuster comes with its very own straight-to-DVD knock-off. Recently, cult label The Asylum have released the likes of Ghosthunters to coincide with 2016's Ghostbusters, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to sponge off the success of Guy Ritchie's equally terrible King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and even Operation Dunkirk to dupe ill-informed shoppers into thinking it was Christopher Nolan's awards-grabber Dunkirk. When I first saw the trailer for Geostorm, I was convinced that The Asylum had stretched their purse-strings a tad, and that Gerard Butler had finally done the decent thing and stepped away from the big screen. It turns out that Geostorm is actually meant to be a proper movie, and that The Asylum's cash-in was in fact called Geo-Disaster.

With its horrendous special effects, ham-fisted action and completely nonsensical premise, I refuse to believe that I'm the only one who couldn't fathom that this was an actual blockbuster attempt. Geostorm may just be one of the stupidest movies ever made, and the real horror is that the final product is actually the result of 15 million dollar re-shoots after audiences reacted badly to test screenings way back in 2015. If this is a result of expensive re-shoots and a two-year hiatus, then I'm almost curious to see what state it was in beforehand. I can only imagine that the original version wasn't quite as hilarious, although Butler was always attached to play Jake Lawson, the brain-child of a giant climate-controlling satellite dubbed 'Dutch Boy', so it must have been at the very least amusing. Dutch Boy monitors and influences the planet's weather after mankind has ravaged the Earth and turned it into a melting-pot of devastating storms and extreme temperatures.

He may be highly intelligent, but as he's played by Butler, he's also punchy and obnoxious, and has his toy taken away from him by a Senate cub-committee after he refuses to cooperate. Jake's brother Max (Jim Sturgess) is placed in charge instead, but Jake's skills and experience in the field may be called upon again when Dutch Boy starts carrying out seemingly random attacks and threatening to cause a 'geostorm' - a super-storm of which none will survive. Abbie Cornish is also in the movie for some reason, even though she's way above this sort of schlock. Soon after starting to navigate through the unnecessarily complicated plot you will realise that very little of Geostorm makes sense, and you can probably work out who the bad guy is by reading the cast list. However, for all its utter stupidity and boring set-pieces where millions are indifferently massacred by bad CGI, I can never say that Dean Devlin's Geostorm was boring. It made me laugh more than once (albeit unintentionally), and although I say this through gritted teeth, it's moderately entertaining, if brainless fluff.


Directed by: Dean Devlin
Starring: Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Alexandra Maria Lara, Andy Garcia, Ed Harris
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie

Review #1,232: 'Kill the Messenger' (2014)

Kill the Messenger, director Michael Cuesta's re-telling of journalist Gary Webb's expose of the CIA's illegal funding of Nicaraguan Contra rebels and its links to the crack epidemic sweeping across the country, has all the ingredients for a gripping, fact-based drama centred around a story everybody should know more about (at the time, people were distracted by Bill Clinton's White House antics involving Monica Lewinsky). Seminal movies such as All the President's Men and Zodiac portrayed the dangers that come with investigative journalism and managed keep a real-life story suspenseful despite many knowing the outcome already. Kill the Messenger sadly doesn't achieve much of this, and although the movie is competently made and solidly acted, it struggles to hold the attention it should demand by playing things frustratingly formal.

Jeremy Renner stars as Webb, the goateed, informally-dressed San Jose Mercury News reporter who carries more than a whiff of anti-establishment about him. While investigating the government seizure of drug dealer's property, even when they've been found innocent, he is handed court papers which seem to reveal that a major drug runner is actually a CIA operative. It's a revelation that will change Webb's life, and he is soon on the government's radar when he follows leads to kingpin Rick Ross (Michael Kenneth Williams) and eventually to Managua to meet with cartel boss Norwin Meneses (Andy Garcia). Everything he uncovers seems to suggest that the CIA, committing high treason in the process, is indirectly funding the wave of crack decimating entire neighbourhoods throughout the U.S. Webb reports his findings in a three-part series entitled Dark Alliance, which quickly becomes one of the internet's first viral hits, before the CIA decide to turn his world upside down.

In many ways, the story of a little guy being cruelly picked apart by higher powers is comparable to the one told in The Insider. Yet Michael Mann's masterpiece also demonstrated that a film can be grounded in fact and procedural while keeping the audience engrossed in the story it's telling. Kill the Messenger wisely reserves a large chunk of the running time for what Webb went through after breaking the story, but much of this is bogged down in cliched domestic squabbles, with Rosemarie DeWitt finding herself criminally underwritten as the nagging wife whose feelings drastically change from one scene to the next. However, it has its moments, especially when showing how Webb was surgically discredited while his bosses (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Oliver Platt) slowly distanced themselves from the negative attention. Renner manages to carry the film despite not being given a whole lot to do apart from exchanging a few "I'm right, you're wrong," arguments with his colleagues. The real-life story alone is shocking enough to make the film worth a watch, but there's a emptiness at its core.


Directed by: Michael Cuesta
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Tim Blake Nelson, Michael Sheen, Barry Pepper, Andy Garcia
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie