Newspaper Preview
Martin Scorsese’s bloated historical punch fest Gangs of New York is finally limping out onto home screens and streaming gadgets everywhere. Set in 1862 during the chaotic Civil War draft riots, the story follows an orphaned immigrant kid hellbent on slicing up the local butcher who gutted his daddy in the snow fifteen years earlier. The whole shebang promises a brutal look at how the Big Apple was actually built, mostly by people screaming, throwing rocks, and hitting each other with rusty hatchets.
Grab your remote, put your feet up, and prepare to sit through nearly three hours of mud, grime, fake accents, and grown men prancing around in tall stovepipe hats. If you like seeing the boyish heartthrob from Titanic get beaten into a bloody lump of mashed potatoes, you might actually get your rental money’s worth out of this expensive brawl.
Review by Ben Dover
Look, I had to drag myself through two hours and forty-seven minutes of this thing on my television screen, and my bad knee is still barking from sitting in the recliner that long. I like a good fistfight as much as the next guy. Back in my day, we solved problems behind the gym in about three minutes, not across three decades of operatic screaming. Marty Scorsese spent over thirty years daydreaming about this movie, and what does he give us? A mud pit populated by teenagers who need haircuts and old guys who need anger management.
Let us start with Daniel Day-Lewis playing Bill the Butcher. The man steals every single scrap of scenery, chops it with a cleaver, and swallows it whole. He struts around in red striped pants with a glass eye, tapping his knife on his false eyeball, sounding like a psychotic cartoon character. Honestly, he is terrific. The problem is that every time he is not on the screen, you are stuck watching Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz trying to act tough. Leo looks like he is about fourteen years old playing dress-up in his grandfather’s dirty clothes, and Diaz sounds like she learned her Irish brogue five minutes before the camera rolled while drinking a shamrock shake.
The pacing is an absolute disaster. The movie opens with an epic brawl that looks like a high school heavy metal concert in a cave, and then it drags on forever with boring political schemes and teenage romantic nonsense. These kids today with their short attention spans will never make it past the first forty minutes. They will be looking down at their little glowing phones playing video games before the first bucket of pig blood even dries. You get long scenes where characters whisper about loyalty in shadowy parlors, interrupted by random knife-throwing acts at a circus show. Pick a lane, Marty!
Then comes the grand finale, where the big grudge match finally happens, except the United States Navy starts blasting cannonballs into the neighborhood from the harbor. You wait almost three hours for a showdown, and half the cast gets wiped out by artillery smoke and falling bricks before they can even trade punches. It completely ruins the fight!
It is not an unwatchable movie because Day-Lewis puts on a masterclass in crazy, but it is way too long, messy, and self-indulgent.
Cast and Characters
- Daniel Day-Lewis (William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting): The only reason to watch this circus. He trained with actual butchers and stays terrifying the whole time.
- Leonardo DiCaprio (Amsterdam Vallon): He tries hard, but he still looks like the fresh-faced kid from the teen magazines.
- Cameron Diaz (Jenny Everdeane): A pickpocket who dresses like a Victorian doll. Her accent drifts across three different oceans depending on the scene.
- Jim Broadbent (Boss Tweed): Corrupt, fat, greedy politician. The only completely believable character because politicians have not changed a lick in two hundred years.
- John C. Reilly (Happy Jack Mulraney): Plays a dirty cop who switched sides. Nice mustache, bad life choices.
- Liam Neeson (“Priest” Vallon): Dies in the first ten minutes. Smartest man in the cast because he got his paycheck and went home early.
Special Effects and Music
The special effects are mostly practical buckets of blood, severed ears, and a massive full-scale city set they built over in Italy. The street sets actually look fantastic, full of filth and real pig carcasses. When they do bring in digital computer junk, like that fake smoke and a CGI elephant running through a fire, it looks pretty goofy.
As for the music, it is all over the place. One minute you get traditional Irish fiddles, the next minute you hear weird tribal drums, and then suddenly you get a screeching pop song from U2 during the end credits. It makes no sense, but at least the loud thumping woke me up whenever the plot started to drag.
Rating
2.5 out of 5 Stars (Two stars for Daniel Day-Lewis, half a star for the set builders, and zero stars for the runtime).
Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown
The whole mess kicks off in 1846 in lower Manhattan’s notorious Five Points slum. An Irish Catholic gang called the Dead Rabbits, led by “Priest” Vallon, clashes in a snowy street war against the Native American Protestant gang led by Bill “The Butcher” Cutting. Bill guts Priest Vallon right in front of Vallon’s young son, Amsterdam. Bill wins the turf war, outlaws the Dead Rabbits, and sends the boy away to an orphanage on Hellgate Island.
Sixteen years roll by. Amsterdam grows up into Leonardo DiCaprio and returns to the Five Points in 1862 looking for revenge. He tosses his Bible into the river, reunites with his old buddy Johnny Sirocco, and infiltrates Bill the Butcher’s inner circle. Bill does not recognize the kid and actually takes him under his wing as a surrogate son and bodyguard. Meanwhile, Amsterdam falls in love with Jenny Everdeane, a clever pickpocket and grifter who used to be Bill’s lover.
Amsterdam plans to murder Bill publicly during the annual celebration honoring Priest Vallon’s defeat, believing a king must be slain in front of his court. However, Johnny gets jealous over Jenny, betrays Amsterdam, and snitches to Bill. At the banquet, Bill calls Amsterdam out during a knife-throwing show. Amsterdam hurls a blade at Bill, but Bill deflects it and counters by pinning Amsterdam to the floor. Instead of killing him, Bill carves Amsterdam’s cheek with a hot blade, beats his face to pulp, and lets him live in disgrace.
Jenny nurses Amsterdam back to health in an underground church. Amsterdam recovers, rallies the Irish immigrant population, hangs a dead rabbit on a lamppost to declare war, and gets the old gang back together. They align with Tammany Hall leader Boss Tweed to back an Irish candidate, Monk McGinn, for sheriff. Monk wins the election by a landslide, so Bill simply murders him in broad daylight with a cleaver on the street.
Amsterdam challenges Bill to a massive, bare-knuckle gang war in Paradise Square. On the day of the fight, the city erupts into the historic Civil War draft riots. Federal troops invade the streets, and naval gunboats start firing heavy shells directly into the Five Points to suppress the rioters. The bombardment decimates the battlefield with dust and shrapnel before the gangs can even finish their clash. Amidst the rubble, a piece of flying artillery shrapnel mortally wounds Bill. Amsterdam stabs the dying butcher, Jenny and Amsterdam bury Bill next to Priest Vallon on a Brooklyn hill overlooking Manhattan, and the two head west while the modern New York skyline gradually grows over their forgotten graves.
5 Famous Quotes
- “I don’t see no Americans. I see trespassers, Irish harps. Do a job for a nickel what a nigger does for a dime and what a white man used to get a quarter for.”
- “When you kill a king, you don’t stab him in the dark. You kill him where the entire court can watch him die.”
- “The ballots don’t make the results, the counters make the results. The counters. Keep counting.”
- “You see this knife? I’m gonna teach you to speak English with this fucking knife.”
- “I killed the last honorable man fifteen years ago.”
5 Interesting Notes and Facts
- Decades on the shelf:Martin Scorsese first read Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York in 1970 and spent roughly 32 years trying to gather the money and star power to actually get it made.
- Built entirely in Rome:Rather than shooting on real New York streets that no longer exist, production designer Dante Ferretti built a full-scale mile-long set of the 1860s Five Points at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, complete with functional saloons and harbor docks.
- Butcher school: Daniel Day-Lewis took his role so seriously that he apprenticed under master butchers in Queens and London to learn how to carve meat and flip cleavers like an authentic Victorian butcher.
- The Blues Brothers almost starred:During early development in the late 1970s, Scorsese’s dream casting for the two lead roles was Dan Aykroyd as Amsterdam and John Belushi as Bill the Butcher.
- George Lucas and the fake elephant:When the crew could not find a live circus elephant in Italy on short notice, visiting friend George Lucas advised them on how to film the empty space so a digital elephant could be edited in later.
Photos
Trailer
Notes
- A movie so long, the kids who started watching it in theaters are collecting Social Security now!
- Daniel Day-Lewis brings a cleaver to a movie where the script brought a butter knife.