Mobsters
(1991/HD-DVD)
Picture:
B Sound: B Extras: D Film: D
One of
the worst big studio Gangster films ever made, Michael Karbelnikoff’s Mobsters (1991) is a wreck of a film
with Christian Slater as Lucky Luciano, who also unfortunately narrates this
weakest of exercises in the genre. The
film wants to show us the past on how some famous gangsters grew up as teen and
rose to power, but the film is laughable from the first scene and arriving year
after the watershed year of Gangster films in 1990, quickly bombed and
evaporated at the box office.
Another
reason Universal is issuing this is because Patrick Dempsey (wasted here as
Meyer Lansky) is now a much bigger star than his co-stars thanks to his TV hit Grey’s Anatomy (reviewed elsewhere on
the site) making it a unexpected curio.
The producers and studios also expected a youth hit similar to Young Guns (on Blu-ray elsewhere on
this site) for which many though the film was a hit only because of a young
cast. Mobsters proves it had more going for it that many expected,
because it plays like a bad TV movie.
Richard Grieco, Costas Mandylor, Michael Gambon, Chris Penn, F. Murray
Abraham, Pyvush Finkel, Seymour Cassel, Laura Flynn Boyle, Andy Romano and an
especially wasted Anthony Quinn.
In a
Sopranos-era world, this would have never been greenlighted.
The 1080p
1.85 X 1 VC-1 image looks like an older HD transfer, has some redness and
detail can be an issue throughout. I
never liked the look of this film either, being one of the worst examples of a
city past that was cleaner than a new shopping mall. Not one shot is memorable and the look
occurrently inauthentic despite Richard Sylbert’s best efforts. The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (like on the Timecop HD-DVD) sounds like
second-generation DTS, but worse as this was a weak Dolby analog SR (Spectral
Recording) theatrical film, sounding too much like it is towards the front
speakers. Extras only include HDi
functions that offer the minimal of functionality and cannot make this mess
more interesting.
- Nicholas Sheffo
