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Kevin Costner and Robert DeNiro square off as Eliot Ness and Al Capone in
this classic mafia movie.
It’s the Prohibition era, and running bootleg
liquor is keeping gangsters in the green. Chicago is a city overrun by corruption, and
Ness is brought in by the Treasury Department to clean things up.
After a
meeting with the officers and beat cops, Ness comes to realize that he’ll have to work
harder than expected to succeed in bringing down the illegal operations of Al Capone. In
Chicago, Capone runs the streets, and if someone crosses his path, it usually means a
call to that individual’s next of kin.
Ness discovers how corrupt the town
really is when a bust goes bad, and he ends up with egg on his face. As he wanders the
streets with his tail tucked, it’s a career beat cop, Jim Malone (Sean Connery), who
makes Ness realize that he’ll have to play by a different set of rules if he wants to win
against Capone.
Ness realizes that the veteran cop is right, and with
Malone’s help he recruits a small band of men to help him bring Capone down. They become
known as the Untouchables, and they eventually bring Capone down for tax evasion—which is
exactly how the bloodthirsty mobster was taken down in real life.
This is
one of my favorite mafia movies of all time. While I don’t like most of Costner’s later
work (mostly because he seems to play every role exactly the same—with the exception of
A Perfect World), I did love his performance in this movie. I’m also a
long-standing fan of Connery and DeNiro—and being a true-crime buff, I was very pleased
with DeNiro’s portrayal of Capone. The re-enactment of Capone killing someone with a
baseball bat was based on a real incident, but they did allow for some artistic
license—since I don’t think Capone actually killed the man at the banquet
table.
When the DVD initially came out, there was only one featurette in
terms of extra materials, and it drove me crazy because I love that aspect of owning the
DVD as much as the movie itself. With the release of this special edition, my appetite
for more information was satisfied because the DVD now offers four new featurettes and
the theatrical trailer.
GRADE: A (movie) A (DVD)
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