Gangster Squad - 1 1/2 smiles

If you’ve seen “The Untouchables,” you’ve seen “Gangster Squad.” Unfortunately for director Ruben Fleischer, his movie fails in comparison even though he has a lush 1940s production design, beautiful period costumes and a cast of gifted actors. The setting is 1949 Los Angeles where the City of Angels has become a criminal empire ruled by Mickey Cohen (a heavily made-up Sean Penn), a flamboyant former featherweight boxer-turned-Jewish-Mafioso from Brooklyn. Cohen has put much of the LAPD and the city’s judiciary on his payroll as he prepares to corner the West Coast market on bookmaking and heroin. Police Chief William Parker (a gravelly-voiced Nick Nolte) tasks Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), a straight-arrow detective and World War II veteran, to recruit a small squad to wage war on Cohen’s various enterprises while ignoring such legal niceties as search and arrest warrants. His men include an expert in illegal wiretaps (Giovanni Ribisi), a retired sure-shot (Robert Patrick), a black beat cop (Anthony Mackie) and Latino rookie (Michael Pena). The most important, and reluctant addition to the squad is Sgt. Jerry Woolers (Ryan Gosling), a smug, nattily dressed, skirt-chasing detective with military experience whose latest conquest is Cohen’s mistress, Grace Faraday (Emma Stone).

Fleischer ignores plot points (such as cops investigating a shot-up home fail to notice a survivor cowering in the bathtub) in favor of lots of over-the-top shoot-em-ups between Cohen’s men and the squad. Plus it appears that he gave Penn explicit orders to portray Cohen as larger-than-life. How else can you explain Penn’s excessive over acting?  “Gangster Squad” is okay while you’re watching it, but it’s hard to take it seriously. 1/13/13