Review: The Irishman (Cryptic Spoilers)

I really enjoyed Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Age of Innocence.

Some of Scorsese’s other movies I only enjoyed because I watched them on devices where there was a fast-forward button to use when the violence slowed down the plot. If you ask me, not much happened during the shootout in Taxi Driver, and that was a good chunk of that movie. When I watched Gangs of New York I was so impatient with the boring violence and … endless … pauses … that I fast forwarded through the entire last quarter of the movie.

The Irishman was the longest movie I have seen in my life, short of Gone With the Wind, and it was very interesting until I realized what it was about, and then it hit the wall. I wasn’t familiar with the real plots of Goodfellas and Casino, so those endings were interesting. An hour into this new movie they introduced a familiar name, and when I saw the sign, and then the house, even, from an article in People a decade ago, I was just waiting for a climax that was no longer a surprise.

When you know the ending, that’s not good, and then when you’ve waited three and a half hours for an ending you know, that’s not an improvement.

I think it will be a good movie for people in about fifty years, when everyone has forgotten about the sign and the house and the characters.