Lock your doors and hide your olive oil, because the Corleones are back. Director Francis Ford Coppola has followed up his 1972 hit with a movie that dares to ask the question: “What if the first movie wasn’t long enough to make your legs fall asleep?”. Somehow this movie is twice as long as “The Godfather” and half as lit. Director Francis Ford Coppola returns to the helm, apparently having found a way to spend twice as much money as last time while filming half the movie in the dark.
It’s a sprawling epic that promises to take you from the dusty streets of old Sicily to the snowy shores of Lake Tahoe, assuming you can keep your eyelids open long enough to see the luggage get unpacked.
The film is a “prequel-sequel” hybrid, which is just a fancy way of saying they couldn’t decide which story to tell, so they dumped both of them into a blender and hit ‘pulse.’ We watch Al Pacino look progressively more depressed in the 1950s while Robert De Niro wanders around 1917 looking for a decent loaf of bread. It’s a monumental achievement in filmmaking, provided your idea of a “monument” is something heavy, made of stone, and completely stationary for hours at a time.
Review by Ben Dover
Look, I know the “experts” and the guys in the turtlenecks at the film school call this a masterpiece. But let’s be real for a second: I’m sixty years old, I’ve got a bad back, and I don’t have three and a half hours to watch a bunch of guys in dark rooms whisper about “respect.” I tried to watch this thing three times. Three times! The first time, I nodded off during a Senate hearing. The second time, I checked out during a parade in Little Italy. By the third attempt, I was snoring so loud the lady in row F threw a box of Raisinets at my head.
The problem isn’t the acting. The kid Al Pacino is a firecracker, but in this one, he’s suppressed all that energy into a permanent scowl. He spends the whole movie sitting in leather chairs, looking at the floor. Then you’ve got the flashbacks with Robert De Niro. Don’t get me wrong, the kid is talented, but he’s playing a young Marlon Brando. He whispers so softly I had to lean toward the screen just to hear him, and even then, it was in Italian! I don’t come to the theater to do homework and read subtitles while a guy slowly creeps across a rooftop for twenty minutes. He spends half the movie speaking Sicilian. Subtitles! If I wanted to read, I’d buy a book.
And what is it with the lighting? I’ve seen brighter basements in a horror movie. Gordon Willis, the cinematographer, is called the “Prince of Darkness,” and I can see why—he clearly forgot to plug in the lamps. I understand it’s supposed to be “moody” and “thematic,” but I’d like to actually see the actors I paid to watch. Half the time, I wasn’t sure if I was watching a Mafia meeting or a power outage at a funeral home.
I don’t understand these kids today who can’t sit still for a five-minute conversation without looking at their gadgets, because back in my day, we sat in a dark room and watched Italians whisper in the shadows for three hours, and we liked it!
I’ll give the movie this: when things actually happen, they’re great. The scene in Cuba when the revolution breaks out is a hoot, and the ending with the boat—well, let’s just say Fredo should’ve stayed on the shore. But for every minute of excitement, there’s forty minutes of men in suits talking about “buffers” and “envelopes.” These kids today have attention spans the size of a gnat, but honestly, I’m starting to side with them. If a movie is longer than a flight to Florida, someone needs to get fired.
It’s the kind of movie that makes you want to go home and hug your brother, right before you realize your brother is a schmuck like Fredo and you’d probably have to send him on a one-way fishing trip too.
The Stars
- Al Pacino (Michael Corleone): He’s the Don now, and he’s about as much fun as a root canal. He’s great at looking like he hates his life, which I can relate to after three hours in that theater.
- Robert De Niro (Vito Corleone): He’s the “Young Don.” He’s very quiet. Very, very quiet. If he were any more understated, he’d be invisible.
- John Cazale (Fredo Corleone): The highlight of the movie. He plays “pathetic” so well it makes me want to buy him a drink and then yell at him to pull himself together.
- Lee Strasberg (Hyman Roth): An old guy who just wants to eat his tuna sandwich and watch the game while he dismantles a criminal empire. My kind of guy, honestly.
- Robert Duvall (Tom Hagen): The lawyer who spends the whole movie trying to keep Michael from imploding. He deserves a raise and a vacation.
Special Effects & Music
The special effects consist of some very realistic-looking fake blood and a boat that moves remarkably slow. The music by Nino Rota is iconic, I’ll give it that. That trumpet theme is beautiful, but after the fourth hour, it starts to sound like a lullaby designed to put me back into my Raisinet-induced coma.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Stars
(It’s a “classic,” sure, but it’s also a world-class sedative. Pack a pillow.)
Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown
The story is split between two eras. In the early 1900s, we see young Vito Andolini flee Sicily after his family is killed by Don Ciccio. He arrives at Ellis Island and is renamed Vito Corleone. He grows up, gets married, and starts a life of crime in New York after being harassed by the local thug Don Fanucci. Vito eventually kills Fanucci, takes over the neighborhood, and moves back to Sicily briefly to disembowel the old man who killed his family. It’s a very long, very slow “how I met your father” story but with more stabbings.
In the 1950s, Michael Corleone is trying to expand into Las Vegas and Havana, Cuba. After an assassination attempt at his home, he goes on a cross-country trek to find out who betrayed him. It turns out to be a tag-team effort between the aging gangster Hyman Roth and Michael’s own brother, Fredo, who was too dim-witted to realize he was being used.
The plot gets tangled in a Senate investigation where Michael almost goes to jail until he brings a witness’s brother into the courtroom to stare him into silence. Finally, Michael’s wife Kay tells him she’s leaving because the “family business” is a nightmare and she had an abortion to stop his bloodline. Michael loses his mind, hits her, and locks her out. Once his mother dies, he has everyone killed—Roth, a former caporegime named Pentangeli, and finally Fredo, who gets shot while praying on a fishing boat. Michael ends up alone in a chair, wondering why nobody wants to come over for Christmas.
5 Famous Quotes
- “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” — Michael Corleone
- “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.” — Michael Corleone
- “My father taught me many things here… he taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” — Michael Corleone (Yeah, he says it twice, we get it!)
- “Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” — Hyman Roth
- “I’m smart! Not like everybody says… like dumb! I’m smart and I want respect!” — Fredo Corleone (Spoiler: He did not get respect.)
- “If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it’s that you can kill anyone.” — Michael Corleone
5 Interesting Facts
- The Title Trouble: This was the first major film to use “Part II” in the title. The studio thought it was a terrible idea. For once, the studio was wrong—though it did start the trend of Jaws 4 and other junk.
- Oscar History: This was the first sequel in history to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
- Oscar History Part II: Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando are the only two actors to win separate Oscars for playing the exact same character (Vito Corleone).
- Marlon’s No-Show: Marlon Brando was supposed to be in the final flashback scene, but he stayed home because he was mad at Paramount. They had to film around his absence, which is why we just see Michael sitting there looking lonely.
- Language Lessons: De Niro had to live in Sicily to learn how to speak the dialect. I can barely get my grandkids to speak English, so I guess that’s impressive.
- The Weight of the Script: The original script was so long you could use it as a doorstop. Coppola had to cut a lot out, and it’s still three and a half hours.
- Family Affair: Many of Coppola’s relatives are in the movie. It’s cheaper than hiring real actors, I suppose. His sister plays Connie, and his mom and dad are in there somewhere too.
Trailer
Even the trailer is long! It still makes the movie look way faster than it actually is
