‘The Alto Knights’ Has All of the Ingredients For a Great Mob Movie and None of the Sauce

The rise of gangsters in America has been (and hopefully always will be) stellar fodder for books, film, and TV. There is so much meat in what it means to be an immigrant in North America, through two world wars, prohibition, and years of discrimination. Media has reached into gangland history for decades, plucking unforgettable stories about guys like Lefty Rosenthal, Henry Hill, Al Capone, etc. The latest attempt at glancing into the background of crime’s ruling class wants to educate audiences on two of the men who fought for leadership of the Luciano crime family.

Robert De Niro stars in dual leading roles as Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, two of the most prominent members of the notorious “Five Families” of Italian American gangsters. The two crime kings fought for, or traded, power over the Luciano crime family in the years after Charles “Lucky” Luciano was exiled to Italy. The Alto Knights focuses on the hot potato of power passed between the two through arrests, divorces, senate testimonies, and assassination attempts. It starts in the middle, with a botched attempt on Costello’s life as ordered by Genovese that prompts Costello to want to retire, but not before tending to his affairs. So sets off Costello’s telling of events as the two rose to power from the streets of New York, wrestled for title, and ultimately turned on each other while the cops and politicians slowly came down on their empire. It’s an otherwise compelling story ripped from gangland history, but it’s so focused on telling too much of it that it’s hard to know what line we’re meant to follow. There’s so much thrown at us, that the “surprise” ending seems to resolve an issue about which the audience wasn’t even aware.

The Alto Knights was written by Nicholas Pileggi whose name will be familiar to any crime film fan. Pileggi wrote “Wise Guy,” the book was adapted into Goodfellas, and “Casino,” which was adapted into the film. It could have been a boon for the writer, whose books have previously served as stunning narration for Scorsese’s feature films, but this script is so lost in trying to tell too much of this story that it ends up telling none of it. The Alto Knights has too much faith in its audience, expecting them to understand the significance of things and names uttered like Joe Profaci, Lucky, Cuba, The Flamingo, Anastasia, Apalachin, and Boss of Bosses, but then has such little faith in the audience that it spends most of the time explaining the history instead of showing it, much of it being told via television broadcast, flashbacks, and narration. If you’ve ever heard the note “show, don’t tell,” you’ll be ever aware of this feature’s failings. The rush to include so much, potentially as a means of comparing the frein-emies, ends up reducing major points to filler and small beats to unwarranted contrast. The movie suffers from Oppenheimer syndrome where the duration of the runtime is played with a plucky staccato, full up with character introductions and backstory and no time to let the movie or its characters breathe.

Characters are only allowed to breathe in scenes with attempted naturalistic dialogue. Instead of allowing them to tell their story, it’s told to us, sometimes directly to camera, and then paired with De Niro seemingly scatting as a frustrated firecracker Genovese. Debra Messing as a supportive wife in Bobbie Costello is a poor excuse at embedding a strong female character who seems to serve as an antidote to Anna Genovese (Katherine Narducci) as further means to distinguish between their husbands. (She is no Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, and it jars me to be giving more credit to a woman character in a Christopher Nolan movie). It’s not on Messing, its that she is inexplicably aged up and made into a cartoon New York Jewish wife who seems only there to react to television exposition along with the audience, and perhaps to tick a box.

Barry Levinson might have lost the movie to its pacing and script, but it looks gorgeous. Costumes and makeup (superfluous, perhaps, but easier to watch than CGI de-aging), sure, but there’s also a personal spin on the 1950s period film we’ve seen a hundred times and that’s what makes the film watchable. Standout performances are fleeting, but the brief shots of Bob Glouberman and Michael Rispoli, et al. show the instinct to give some guys room to act in small beats that feel plucked from other crime dramas.

The Alto Knights has all the ingredients, from Pileggi to De Niro and all of the gangland icons, but none of the je ne sais quois to come together. Narration worked in Goodfellas because audiences could contrast “present day” Henry Hill from the Hill who lived in the moments we were seeing (something elevated by Ray Liotta’s performance), this narration serves as a crutch. Tom Hardy as Reggie and Ronald Kray in Legend allowed an actor to show the varying swagger and personas of identical twins as a means of creating contrast, here it feels like a gimmick where both characters are played too straight. Title cards for courtroom scenes in a movie that’s not a courtroom drama feel out-of-place, major character intros in the last thirty minutes are confusing, and the stakes feel non-existent in a story that starts with an assassination attempt and ends in a history lesson about the rise of the DEA. It’s final utterances on “uneducated immigrants” is such a glib glazing over of the history of the rise of organized crime in America that backwardly maligns the spirit of immigrants chasing the “American Dream.”

Call me soft on crime, but these men deserve such a better telling of their story.

The Alto Knights hits theaters March 21, 2025