MOB COPS - Mark Reviews Movies

Mob Cops, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 24, 2025

There's a potentially worthwhile story at the core of Mob Cops. If Kosta Kondilopoulos' screenplay took some time to breathe during its onslaught of exposition, the movie might have been able to tell that story, too.

Instead, this fictionalized version of the tale of two New York City cops who became directly involved with the criminal affairs of the mafia just keeps telling us details, instead of letting us see them or get any sense of the characters doing those things or having those things done to them. The narrative features at least three narrators over the course of its decades-spanning plot, starting in the 1980s and ending in the early 2000s, and all of them basically tell us the same thing over and over: The mob is a violent, nasty business. The movie seems to believe this either will come as a shock to the audience or is some kind of revelatory foundation for an entire story.

It's hard to believe even Kondilopoulos and director/star Danny A. Abeckaser believe either of those things to be a possibility, given how entrenched the material is in the clichés and familiar points of pretty much any mob movie that has come before this one. The gangsters all talk as if they were raised on a diet on those movies, although at least they're a bit franker about whom needs to be taught a lesson or killed in this one. The story is in such a rush to get at every dramatized detail it wants to hit that there's simply no time for evasive riddles about seeing a guy about a thing or getting some guy to do that thing to some other guy.

The basic story is split in two, between the dirty dealings of a couple of crooked cops in the '80s and the determined investigation of a pair of different cops into those past events in the 2000s. Our upright police detective is Tim Delgado (Abeckaser), who explains via voice-over that he has a professional and personal connection to the crimes of those corrupt cops. Two brothers were murdered in gangland killings some time ago, with one of them being an informant for Delgado, and the men's mother (played by Deborah Geffner) still wants to know what happened to the body of one of her sons.

All of this is brought to the surface after many years because Leo Benetti (Jeremy Luke), a retired NYPD cop, has written a book about his family ties to the mafia and his career of dealing with organized crime. The brothers' mother recognizes the man's photo on TV from an encounter she witnessed between the cop and one of her sons—shortly before he was murdered. She suspects Benetti and his partner Sammy Canzano (David Arquette) must know something about her sons' deaths or could be involved, and since Delgado's narration explains that he has come to have a friendship with this woman, he goes on to explain that he's going to start looking into those two cops.

From there, Delgado's disembodied voice goes on to explain the cops' history (with a lot of it playing on obvious sound stages) and how he, along with his own partner (played by Nathaniel Buzolic), piece together the actual, more sinister ties Benetti and Canzano had to the mob. The present-day cops receive some help from currently imprisoned mafia bosses Galiano (Jospeh Russo), whose hair simply goes from black to gray to distinguish his past and present self, and Sherman (Bo Dietl) to fill in the most damning evidence against the corrupt cops.

Obviously, the mob guys do that by explaining a bunch of different anecdotes about how Benetti and Canzano started by detaining people the mafia wanted killed, before moving on to murder themselves for a bigger payday. It's all flat, by-the-numbers, and repetitive exposition, with no sense of these characters or even a hint of personality beyond the most stereotypical of mob-related media. This guy needs to be whacked, so the cops arrange it. This other guy should be killed, so the cops do it. How any of these people know about a family dinner or arguments the crooked cops had with their wives is a mystery, but it's not as if those domestic scenes are really revealing anything, beyond the fact that filmmakers know similar movies have such moments in them, too.

The movie is just over 80 minutes long, which hopefully gives some sense of just how the script barrels through its information. Mob Cops does serve as some proof of the relativity of time, because that dull assault of continuous details quickly becomes a monotonous drag.

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