Robert De Niro stars opposite himself in Barry Levinson’s period mob drama – but has the unusual casting undermined a solid gangster movie?
The week The Alto Knights – Barry Levinson’s zeitgeist-defying gangster drama – hits cinemas, the only media anyone is talking about is Netflix’s Adolescence. That, or how much they hate Snow White. Inside of us are two wolves, et cetera, et cetera.
But while Disney’s latest live-action remake looks like exactly the kind of risk-averse, straight-down-the-middle offering guaranteed to put family bums on cinema seats, Adolescence and The Alto Knights both promise something a little quirkier from a filmmaking point of view. The former shot each of its four hour-long episodes in a single take; Levinson’s film copy-pastes Robert De Niro to play both leads. If I were being ungenerous, I’d describe both as ‘stunt filmmaking’ – the kind of technical wizardry designed to help elevate something into the cultural conversation, the cinematic equivalent of hiring Charli xcx for your mystery A24 film.
In Adolescence’s case, it’s a gimmick which has done it a world of good. While initial reports of Jack Thorne’s Netflix smash may have focused on its one-shot trickery, it didn’t take long before the conversation exploded into a different angle. In the last week, the show has soared to the number one spot on the streamer’s TV charts and penetrated hard news offerings like BBC’s Newscast and Global’s The News Agents. The one-shot nature of the thing is just one piece of a puzzle combining a hot-topic issue with a profound and human story. What’s most remarkable about Adolescence isn’t what’s on the surface – it’s what’s under the hood.
The Alto Knights, on the other hand, is a resolutely unremarkable film, which is probably the most interesting thing about it. A 123-minute, solidly three-star period gangster flick based on the real-life power struggle between Mafia bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, it’s a pitch-perfect example of the sort of thing unlikely to get a cinema release in 2025.
This is by no means a bad thing – perfectly entertaining, grown-up mob movies are the stuff plenty of film fans live for. But it’s a premise unlikely to overshadow what appears at first glance to be either a marketing quirk or an ego trip from its lead actor – what should have been a rock-solid return to a well-loved, under-served genre has arrived as “the film where Robert De Niro talks to himself”. When the story underneath is hardly groundbreaking stuff, that’s a difficult draw to get people into cinemas.
Compare its reception to last week’s Mickey 17 – Bong Joon-ho’s satirical sci-fi which blended its pair of curiously similar stars into its story with ease. There, the doubling effect felt like part of a cohesive hole, rather than a filmmaking experiment tacked on after the script had already been locked down.
As a result, it’s hard not to wonder what a more conventionally made Alto Knights would have looked like. De Niro does a fine job playing both sides of the Mafia rivalry, but in the few scenes they spend together, the fact they both have broadly the same face is a barrier to credulity it’s difficult to get past. The film would almost certainly have been a more affecting piece of art had they shipped someone, anyone in to play opposite the legend of The Godfather Part II, Casino and Goodfellas. Unless that person was Timothée Chalamet, they’d probably have saved a heap on prosthetics, CGI and actors’ wages, too.
It’s a shame, because the box office headwinds facing Alto Knights approaching its opening weekend mean we’re unlikely to get something of its ilk again anytime soon. Compare its reception to something like Knives Out – which took a dead-in-the-water genre in 2019, played it more-or-less straight down the middle, and revitalised it for a new generation. While it might be a stretch to expect the same thing of a parallel version of Alto Knights, it’s worth appreciating what can turn into a hit when a movie is allowed to be just, well, a movie.
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
