Review of Gangs of New York (2002) by Afm185 — 21 Jun 2020

I don’t know exactly where to start with this one. The story is pretty great, I was interested the whole time even though the execution left something to be desired. It’s super long but parts felt undeveloped at the same time.

Especially the relationships between characters. The way it’s paced feels kinda off because near the beginning to a little past the middle things build pretty slowly and then at a certain point it all speeds up in an awkward way and as a result the ending feels a bit unsatisfying.

There were a total of 0 times I felt affected by a character death, it all just felt like it was a progression of the plot rather than something you should feel saddened by. I mean I felt tension quite a few times, but the movie is oddly predictable especially when it comes to deaths.

Though that’s not such a bad thing I guess. I should say again the story is great. Like it really does feel kinda epic. The characters are great and they feel like interesting people, but again just a bit undeveloped.

Even the two main characters I kinda wanted to get a feel for who they were a little more. And that’s weird considering how much you see them. I really don’t even know how to describe it. Their motivations and struggles always feel a bit ambiguous, aside from one pretty clear goal for the main character.

The dialogue from everyone is usually great so conversations almost never felt tedious to watch. The acting is fantastic in this and the setting looks amazing for what it is, which is 1800s New York. It was cool to learn more about how society worked, but again even that felt just a little hard to grasp because there were aspects to it they just didn’t explain that well, including bits I’d say are eventually pretty damn relevant.

I should mention though- the action scenes in this are pretty bad. I was genuinely disappointed by how boring most of them were. In fact, just the conversations were infinitely more entertaining for me.

I should say I wasn’t particularly enjoying myself throughout the movie, but I was definitely interested in seeing how everything would go down.