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Information
- Year
- 1999
- Runtime
- 116 min.
- Director
- John McNaughton
- Genres
- Crime, Drama
- Rating *
- 5.4
- Votes *
- 831
- Checks
- 32
- Favs
- 1
- Dislikes
- 2
- Favs/checks
- 3.1% (1:32)
- Favs/dislikes
- 1:2
Top comments
-
CinemaDump
Synopsis
Meyer Lansky (Richard Dreyfuss), currently in Jerusalem remembers his tumultuous childhood. When he was a boy, his family was forced to flee the Polish city of Grodno because of a rash of pogroms. Arriving in New York City, he quickly fell into the world of gambling followed by a variety of other illegal exploits along with friends Bugsy Siegel (Eric Roberts) and Lucky Luciano (Anthony LaPaglia).
Review
The bones of a good movie are there but Lanksy never actually puts any flesh on those bones. Dreyfuss, Roberts and LaPaglia make a good enough trio but there is pretty much nothing compelling at all about the entire 114 minutes of this film. It's undeniably boring and by the end of it I didn't feel like I had learned anything about doing crime during the time period the story takes place in or about Meyer Lansky himself. How the latter could happen is a complete mystery to me.
Richard Dreyfuss has the look of Meyer Lansky down pretty nicely and his acting performance seems pretty good at first. The makeup is well done and Dreyfuss does the old man walk pretty convincingly too. But wow does his performance get annoying after a while. Old man Lansky to me is a heavy breathing man who has a habit of chuckling after everything he says. There is nothing else to Dreyfuss' performance because he's not given anything interesting to do anyway but annoyingly give advice at every opportunity. Followed by lots of chuckling when he can fit it in. It would appear that everything in Lansky's life is an opportunity to be a preachy know-it-all and claim to be nothing more than a gambler whenever his character is called into question.
The pacing of Lansky feels off at times because of how much the movie jumps through time periods of Meyer Lansky's life combined with the fact that it's a TV movie and has to make room for commercials. There is a lot of ground covered but never is there any real exploration into the mind of Lansky. He does some pretty crazy stuff and yes, some of it is highly illegal. Movie watchers and makers have had a love affair with criminals for a long time but I'm not sure that the makers of Lansky really cared that much about Meyer Lansky at all if this film is anything to go by.
Another huge problem is that the scriptwriter David Mamet seems to expect you to know all about Meyer Lansky. So much stuff gets glossed over and nothing seems to be properly explained. I don't think it's a case of me wanting to be spoonfed either. Some episodes of Lansky's life are pretty clear but then as soon as there's something that requires a bit more development, the story jumps into the future and that's that. I can get that Lansky has had a pretty exciting life but I don't even know what it is he exactly did. I got more information from his Wikipedia page than from this film.
Lansky feels very TV movie-ish at times and despite a promising cast, it's a complete failure as a crime movie. The portion of the story that takes place in the present is dull and the portion of the story which takes place in the past never amounts to anything. Nothing builds up to any sort of excitement and there really could've been. Dreyfuss as Meyer Lansky ended up completely getting on my nerves but probably the biggest failure of Lansky is that I did not know who the blazes Meyer Lansky was by the end of it.
Rating
5/10 9 years 7 months ago