‘The Alto Knights’ Is De Niro Con: The Movie

There are, by the organization’s current count, some 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild, many of whom are booking gigs on the regular. To be fair, very few of these performers are genuine 1970s cinema icons, not to mention the brand-name embodiment of a whole genre. Robert De Niro is to Mob movies what John Wayne was to Westerns, and though he’s played every type of role imaginable — boxers, bakers, bishops, ballplayers, cops, robbers, revolutionaries, a stitched-together corpse having an existential crisis, even the devil himself — it’s made-men crime flicks that people most associate the unofficial mayor of Tribeca with. Put it to you this way: If there is, in fact, a cosplay element to De Niro Con, the now-annual event that celebrates everything Bobby D.-related, they’re probably not dressing up like the title character of the 1990 romantic drama Stanley & Iris. (We pray on bent knees, however, that at least one person would show up as Fearless Leader from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.)

So yes, the creatives behind The Alto Knights, director Barry Levinson’s Advanced Mob History 108 lecture course about the attempted capo di tutti capi coup that started a gang war in 1950s New York City, could have picked from a legion of perfectly fine character actors or big-time movie stars to play against De Niro. It would just depend on which lead part the legend would want to play, and he’d have his pick of two good ones. In this corner: Frank Costello, the big boss man of organized crime who helped this thing of theirs go from regional to a national syndicate. He’s classy, canny about business, and enjoys sunsets and long walks in the park. In the other corner: Vito Genovese, Costello’s childhood friend and fellow racketeer, who had to leave town long ago because of a thing, and has now come home to resume his place in the Mafia hierarchy. Except the world has moved on while he’s been gone, and Vito, well, he don’t like that. So Genovese decides to orchestrate a regime change. It gets bloody.

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A hard decision to make, right? The king defending his crown, eager to retire but forced to hold on for the good of the empire, or the hothead ready to take to the mattresses in the name of all the marbles. What to do? [Shrugs] Fuck it. Cast De Niro in both roles. Why not?

It’s the single most inspired element of Levinson’s stab at a Mafia saga, which starts with a Genovese-ordered assassination attempt on Costello in his building’s lobby and ends with an elderly Frank reminiscing about the bad old days as a Kodak Picture Carousel — still not a spaceship, but a time machine! — clicks through pics of his lucratively misspent youth. The bad news is that this doubling down on De Niro seems to have been where the inspiration both begun and ended. The Alto Knights may have its share of talent spread around, with no less than Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas) penning the screenplay, cinematographer Dante Spinotti (Heat, Public Enemies, L.A. Confidential) setting up a warm, autumnal period-piece palette and production designer Neil Spisak channeling the lost Gotham of yesteryear. But all of it is simply at the service of one long retread of very well-trod ground. You’d swear that this was simply reverse-engineered to play every single Sunday Afternoon Mafia Movie Marathon on a second-rate cable channel in perpetuity, and its ambitions stopped there.

Would you gladly sit through what feels like a two-hour highlight reel of past Mob classics, ranging from Once Upon a Time in America to Casino? Are you content to

watch a lot of Italian-American actors of a specific vintage get decked out in Cosa Nostra chic and throw tough-guy looks while Dino, Frankie, Sammy and a host of other ring-a-ding-ding crooners fill the soundtrack? Does the idea of Debra Messing portraying Mrs. Bobbie Costello as a sort of Hera in furs, or the great Katherine Narducci vamping it up as Genovese’s spurned spouse Anna, get your pulse racing? How about Shōgun‘s Cosmo Jarvis as most incompetent killer in the tri-state area, with the caveat being that the only direction he seems to have received was, “Get into this fatsuit and pretend you’re wearing a neck brace the entire time?” Have you ever found yourself arguing over whether the infamous Apalachin Summit, in which Mafia bigwigs from around the country gathered together in upstate New York for a syndicate meeting and were subsequently busted, was a set-up or just bad luck into the wee small hours of the night?

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If you answered “Yes” to any of those questions or are already a card-carrying De Nirologist, then this movie may indeed be for you. The latter group will admittedly have a lot to chew on here, with the star offering a sort of meta-commentary track on a career spent playing gangsters. His take on Costello is essentially De Niro the Celebrity: a sort of elder statesmen content to show up and accept awards in his autumn years, enjoying the fruits of decades’ worth of labor while coasting on a well-honed reputation. All the while, of course, Costello is observing everyone around him, making sure everything is running smoothly, the money is coming in and people are taken care of. He doesn’t lose his temper, at least not in front of others. Sub in a national crime syndicate for downtown Manhattan hotels, eateries and a film festival, and you sense that this well-respected boss of bosses is not too far from the real thing.

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His Genovese, however, is like De Niro Classic: a character who’s violent, volatile and ready to burn it all down, operating on a philosophy of shoot first and fuck all your questions later. He’s an old school mobster, the kind of criminal for whom operating outside of the law is a far more ideal place to be than going legit. Ruling by respect and ruling by fear are the same thing in his eyes. “Loose cannon” is too mild a descriptive. In the old days, Joe Pesci would have nailed this type. Now, De Niro plays him by imitating Pesci’s nasal, wiseguy whine and adopting the cagey posture of a lifelong predator. It’s like Johnny Boy from Mean Streets grew up to be a made guy, upgraded his suits but still kept his unpredictable edge. You might not slot this next to the actor’s truly great late-career turns (which we’d argue are Killers of the Flower Moon, The Irishman, and Stone). But it’s close enough.

Both performances suggest the star didn’t sign up to phone things in, and the difference between Costello’s near-unflappable cool and Genovese’s semi-grotesque aping of old Warner Brothers gangsters — there are moments when you swear Vito saw Little Caesar and thought, “Life goals” — feels monumental. You can see why the star might have relished the challenge of tackling them in tandem, much less literally playing them against each other in a few scenes. And even he can’t save this museum piece from eventually giving in to torpor and slowly toppling over. It still feels like you’ve wandered into a Mob-themed animatronic presentation at some amusement park — the Disney Hall of Famous Mafia Bosses — and dutifully watch as landmark moments in crime history are checked off and re-enacted. Take away the De Niro Con: The Movie bona fides, and you’ve got nothing but a fancy Discovery special. Forget about it.