Gangs of New York

DIRECTED BY Martin Scorsesee
STARRING Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cameron Diaz, Jim Broadbent, John C. Reilly, Liam Neeson
Miramax Home Entertainment


Much was made of the fact that Daniel Day-Lewis prepared for his role as Gangs of New York’s psychotic thug overlord Bill the Butcher by cranking up Eminem.

But rewatching this epic tale of nineteenth-century gang warfare, you can’t help but wonder if he did so not to get himself in a maniacal mood but to drown out the godawful “Oirish” accents emanating from some of his costars. Nor are wandering brogues the only problem with a film that finds Leonardo DiCaprio leaving reform school not to avenge the Butcher’s murder of his father — at least not at first — but rather to hang out in the manner of a teen stoner under the misapprehension that growing a goatee is synonymous with developing a personality.

Of Cameron Diaz’s allegedly tough-as-nails pickpocket-whore, meanwhile, let us just say that not since Keanu Reeves played the inventor of cold fusion in Chain Reaction has someone so singularly failed to suspend disbelief.

Compared to the standards of Goodfellas and Mean Streets, the result is a mess. But those are damn high standards. And there are some sequences, particularly the opening carnage-drenched battle between Day-Lewis’s native psychos and Liam Neeson’s Irish interlopers, that any director would be proud to call his own.

Indeed, Day-Lewis is a treat throughout, whether he’s gutting enemies like pigs or pigs like enemies. But what really elevates Gangs above such recent, ephemerally similar epics as, say, Titanic is its sense of moral weight. In his depiction of how racial and religious divisions can beget near-genocidal violence, Scorsese has created a film whose message could not be clearer, no matter how mangled the accent that’s delivering it.