THE ALTO KNIGHTS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Alto Knights, Warner Bros. Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 20, 2025

By all appearances, the pedigree of The Alto Knights seems unassailable. It's a gangster movie starring Robert De Niro and made by other people who are no strangers to the genre. That includes screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, an author responsible for some of the most influential books on the subject that, in turn, inspired some of the great films about the mob. Director Barry Levinson made a very good one, too, although to mention any of those films in a review would be to give some credence that this mess belongs in the same conversation as those. One cannot give a movie's marketing team an opportunity to take even a vague comparison out of context.

Speaking of marketing, the main selling point of Levinson's movie, perhaps, is that De Niro plays dual roles in it. He portrays both Frank Costello, a "professional gambler" who was quietly the "boss of bosses" among New York City's mafia groups, and Vitto Genovese, another gangster who would get into a feud with his old friend Costello over control of the criminal operations of the city. Each of these elements—both the notion of two De Niro performances for the price of one and the basic premise—sounds pretty good on paper, too.

What in the hell went wrong, then? This movie ends up being two hours of characters either saying exactly what's happening or talking around it, actors looking as if they'd rather be anywhere else, and a narrative that randomly jumps through time, in order for past versions of the characters to explain what the present ones already have, and barely scratches the surface of why this battle between old pals is significant in any way. It's the outline of a mob movie, made with no apparent passion or, for that matter, interest in the subject.

The movie begins in 1957, with an even older Frank narrating with the kind of indecision that will quickly define the dialogue throughout the movie. After a night out at the Copacabana with his wife Bobbie (Debra Messing), Frank returns alone to the apartment building where the two live for some "business." As he stares at the elevator, a man enters, raises a pistol, and shoots Frank in the head. The editing of this sequence alone is a nightmare of spatial incoherence, and adding to the temporal disjointedness that comes to define a large chunk of the movie, we get to watch it all over again at least once and with even more confusion inserted into the flashback.

Frank survives and, knowing that his ambitious friend Vito is responsible for the assassination attempt, decides to retire, lest their dispute spread throughout the city. In case one's wondering, it is easy to tell Frank and Vito apart, even though De Niro plays both of them. Frank's the one with the prosthetic nose, and Vito is the one who sounds as if he's inhaled a full balloon of helium before each take. To be fair, watching De Niro verbally spar with himself in a couple of scenes is worth something, because the split-screen effect is seamless and the actor can play these kinds of roles in his sleep. He might wish he had been napping when the offer for this movie arrived.

From that introduction, the story jumps back into the past, to tangentially and hastily explain that Frank took over as mafia boss after Vito fled to Italy to avoid a double-murder charge, and further into the past, to show them as young men being friendly, and to an older Frank looking right at the camera to tell us what we're watching or just saw a few minutes prior. A sequence like that might happen within a minute or two, by the way, and the rush of so much repeatedly empty storytelling is almost impressive.

The rest of the story, such as it is, hits all the usual highlights and only the basics. Vito is insulted by Frank's no-show at a party for his return and sends assassin Vincent (Cosmo Jarvis) after him. Frank tells his wife that he's going to retire and wants to make things right with Vito. The other bosses argue about what should be done about Vito. People are killed, and all the while, Frank tells several other people that he still wants to retire and make things right with his old pal. Everyone talks and talks without much flair or about anything other than what we need to know and what, presumably, they already know.

The whole of The Alto Knights is like that, really. It's only about itself as the broad notion of what a gangster movie is, while offering no personality, insight, or basic narrative competence to exist as more than the mere idea of a movie.

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