The Alto Knights: a double dose of De Niro can’t save this cluttered true-crime story
Barry Levinson’s take on a 1950s feud between mobsters Frank Costello and Vito Genovese has moments of wry humour, but the sheer De Niro-ness of it all makes it hard to differentiate between the two characters.
“You’re the actor. The best actor in the world” Vito Genovese’s estranged wife (an unruly Kathrine Narducci) bawls across the courtroom at her vicious gangster husband. Since he’s played by Robert de Niro, busily performing here as both Vito and his crime capo nemesis Frank Costello, there’s a sharp, knowing bark of audience laughter. It’s one of a handful of winking bright spots in Barry Levinson’s immaculately pedigreed but predictable movie, a cluttered true-crime history of a 1950s mob feud that completely revolves around De Niro’s showy double act.
The ambitious Vito (newly returned from Italian exile in World War II) challenges his cautious boss Frank for control of their New York crime family, and the movie rapidly becomes a literal face-off between them, as they glare at each other across café tables.
Wearing a chunky false chin worthy of The Penguin (2024), De Niro spits out Vito’s demands, while simultaneously receiving them calmly as Frank, an avuncular mob-grandee sporting a blobby latex nose. Under the eye-catching prosthetics, De Niro’s careful performances form an interesting contrast, his impulsive greedy Vito the very model of a street hoodlum, his Frank a sly, fully-assimilated strategist, the ‘Prime Minister of the Underworld’. But the sheer De Niro-ness of it all makes it hard, sometimes impossible, to engage with them as separate characters.
This somewhat undermines screenwriter Nick Pileggi’s sprawling friends-to-foes narrative, which centres closely on Vito and Frank’s’s real-life journey from Little Italy boyhood bonding to deadly post-war rivalry. After Frank finds himself the victim of a botched 1957 hit ordered by Vito (shown in a crackling opening sequence), he steers us through their conflict using familiar-feeling Goodfellas-style voiceovers and direct-to-camera narration, the story only sparking to life for Vito’s violent Mafia activities and volatile marriage.
Faced with enough material for a four-hour Netflix drama (which would have served the winding story far better) Levinson is forced to cram in Vito and Frank’s vital decades of backstory in a confusing flurry of fake ‘period’ photos and archive footage. But he rightly recreates the 1950s feud as unabashedly an old men’s wily game, less about gunplay (bar a satisfyingly traditional barbershop hit) than tense grillings by Senate Committees, and slow-burn payback.
The Alto Knights is its most enjoyable when Levinson is finding wry humour in the rousting of mud-spattered mafiosi at an upstate mob summit interrupted by cops. If The Irishman (2019) was a sombre elegy for a lifetime in the mafia, this is an altogether cheerier appreciation of the mobster’s craft – a film made by one set of resilient veterans in praise of another.
► The Alto Knights is in UK cinemas now.