Freelancers (2012)

Freelancers (2012)

Directed by: Jessy Terrero

Starring: 50 Cent, Robert De Niro, Forest Whitaker

Cool, a movie with both De Niro and Forest Whitaker and it still managed to suck. That’s impressive, in a really stupid kind of way. To be honest, Whitaker didn’t really put his best effort forth for this one, but who could possibly blame him. A star vehicle for 50 Cent? Sounds like a nice paycheck if not much else.

Three new cops on the force get involved with Robert De Niro’s “special task force”, which uses crooked cops to steal and sell drugs from other criminals. 50 Cent learns that De Niro was the one who killed his dad (who was also working for him), so he stages a coup to take his place as the head crooked cop, I guess.

Freelancers merges all the predictability of a mob movie with all the tedium of a cop movie. I know what you’re thinking, that De Niro is good in anything and it’ll at least be worth watching for him. Wrong. Those words that I put into your mouth are wrong and how dare you for hypothetically thinking them.

The Godfather, Part II (1974)

The Godfather, Part II (1974)

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall

So it’s a pretty popular opinion that The Godfather, Part II is one of the best movies ever made. It’s a nearly four hour long mob epic with fantastic performances from both Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in completely separate stories in two different time periods. How in the world did the whole “two stories” thing fly with critics?

Al Pacino, now in charge of his mafia family, has to deal with a drunk uncle who’s trying to testify against the family in a senate hearing, as well as a lawyer who owns some hotels in Havana that he wants to inherit. Meanwhile, in the past, we follow a young Vito Corleone (De Niro) as he sets up his crime family after being snuck to America out of Italy.

Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t a boring moment of the film, and the way they handle going back and forth between the two plots isn’t jarring or confusing at all. It’s more that it just seems really weird to even have the flashback stuff in there at all. Clearly the reason is that Coppola wanted to make his 10 hour Godfather epic version with everything in chronological order and he had to put the earlier stuff in this movie to make that happen, and honestly that sounds like a pretty shitty reason to me.

The Deer Hunter (1978)

The Deer Hunter (1978)

Directed by: Michael Cimino

Starring: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Cazale

I had heard of The Deer Hunter from film friends before, but other than the fact that it won some Oscars and had De Niro in it, I didn’t know anything about it. I certainly didn’t know that it was a rambling three-hour long testament to a director going insane and having way too much control over a poorly-thought-out story.

Three steel worker friends join the army and go over to Vietnam. They’re captured by the Viet Cong and forced to play Russian Roulette for their sadistic captors’ amusement. They escape and two of them get back to America, thinking the third was dead. As it turns out, he was still in Nam and had become a professional Russian Roulette player.

There are two good scenes in this film and it’s three hours long, the first hour of which is just an elaborate wedding sequence which could’ve easily been summed up in 15 minutes. De Niro’s okay in the film, as is Walken, but it’s not even close to the top for either of them. In fact, none of the characters in the film feel like real people at all, constantly doing purposeless things and interacting with each other as if none of the events in the film so far had happened, or if completely different things had. It’s a mess of a movie and I couldn’t possibly tell you why it’s one of those well-known “must see” movies.