It’s another very long one. And I can’t say I enjoyed it an awful lot.
The story is suitably epic in nature, spanning the demise and rise of the Dead Rabbits gang of Irish immigrant New Yorkers in the 1860s. We have poor troubled Leonardo di Caprio butting heads with Daniel Day Lewis’ ’the butcher’ - an unrelentingly nasty, greasy, sneering gang leader. The period look and the grimy feel are done incredibly well, and it’s getting bits of the geography of New York filtered through the lens of mid-19th century rioters.
But? Well its long. Very long. And those impressively nasty, grimy characters? They just keep on being so. And on. And on. Whereas last week’s film tag, Cloud Atlas packed story after story into its nearly-three-hours, here Scorsese really only has one story to tell. I like a good bit of bloody violence and gratuitous cruelty, but was pretty tired of this by the time the end rolled around.