The Alto Knights: Why Robert De Niro’s gangster epic should have been better

Between Robert De Niro, director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, there’s a lot of history in mobster movies – Goodfellas, The Godfather Part II, Bugsy, Casino and Mean Streets, just to name a few.

But rather than a cracking gangster epic, the should’ve been formidable triumvirate made The Alto Knights, a bloated and tired drama that feels much longer than its two hours.

It’s not that the film is bad, it’s just strained. It’s trying to be weighty when it should’ve just been a bit more entertaining. They’re mobsters. They might take themselves very seriously but the rest of us see the inherent silliness in overcompensating men playing a game of Risk.

The Alto Knights features De Niro playing two characters, rival bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. The costuming and make-up department did a good job differentiating the two, as did De Niro who turned in two very different performances.

It doesn’t really make sense why it committed to this as anything other than a marketing gimmick of “It’s De Niro versus De Niro”. Thematically, the argument is likely along the lines of, two men who grew up together and were as thick as actual thieves found themselves on opposite sides of a war, emphasising how they should’ve stayed as brothers-in-arms.

If that was the ambition to justify the dual casting, the execution was lacking. You never feel a particularly strong connection between Vito and Frank, except that De Niro as Frank tells you so in the voiceover narration.

Vito and Frank were real-life New York City mobsters who made their money and gained a lot of influence through the Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s.

Vito was the rough-and-tumble gangster who came up as an underboss to Lucky Luciano and had little restraint when it came to meting out violence for control. Frank took a more subtle approach and amassed political power, especially through Tammany Hall, and paid off cops and judges.

By 1957, when most of The Alto Knights takes place, Frank sits at the top of the mafia org chart in the US as the boss of the bosses, while Vito is resentful towards Frank because of territory he ceded to his former friend when he fled the country pre-WWII. He wants it back, and he wants to run his drug trade unimpeded.

The movie starts with the attempted assassination of Frank by a Vito-directed underling. The bullet only grazed Frank’s head, but it triggers a set of events culminating in the infamous November 1957 Apalachin Meeting between a nationwide network of mobsters.

Some individual set-pieces are compelling, as are certain performances in other scenes. There’s an amusing moment with Vito and his cronies watching on TV as Frank squirms in front of a congressional hearing as if it was some deranged episode of Gogglebox.

But the movie as a whole doesn’t cohere in a satisfying way. The jumps between flashbacks and voiceovers and present-day scenes are muddled, and you’ll need to google the history of the characters to get a proper comprehension of their stories.

Perhaps that’s the ultimate sin in The Alto Knights – the film made Vito and Frank seem small, like just another two bit players in a larger gang war rather than the Herculean mob bosses they actually were.

The combination of De Niro, Levinson and Pileggi feels similarly insignificant.

Rating: 2.5/5

The Alto Knights is in cinemas