Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Overrated

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Sean Penn plays 1940's mobster Mickey Cohen. It is set in Los Angeles and Penn scowls and spews venom for almost two hours. Josh Brolin is an honest cop who is drafted to make life miserable for Mickey. He recruits fellow cops to work off the record, doing whatever it takes to beat the bad guys. Ryan Gosling is one of them and Emma Stone is his and Cohen's squeeze in a dangerous love triangle. The lines are a bit cliche, but the acting is awesome. Sean Penn can do anything on screen and be totally believable. Gangsters is a fun diversion for a couple of hours.

Initially intended to be released in September 2012, the high-gloss crime-action-movie "Gangster Squad" directed Ruben Fleischer and ensemble cast, led by ultra-evil looking actor Sean Penn as legendary mobster Mickey Cohen and solid-counterstriking actor Josh Brolin as Sgt. John O'Mara, enriched by an emerging love-story between actress Emma Stone as Grace Faraday and Ryan Gosling as Sgt. Jerry Wooters before its fulminate fulfillment in "La La Land" (2016) years later.A movie, which revives Film-Noir classics as "White Heat" (1949) starring James Cagney and more recent homages as "L.A. Confidential" (1997) directed by Curtis Hanson (1945-2016), without reaching the processors narrative qualities by falling into traps of making it a graphic novel adaptation looking thrill-ride of 105 Minutes (excluding end credits) to ensure participation of comic-book-movie spoiled international audiences, which did not fall for the obvious-manipulative nature of the picture, resulting in a U.S. domestic box office failure with just 46 Million Dollar in revenue by 60 Million Dollar production expenses.Furthermore and unfortunate due to a real-life U.S. movie theater shooting / massacre in a preview of "The Dark Knight Rises" in July 2012, the original cut of the film had been condemned by Warner Bros. executives ethical decision to drop an entire scene of "Gangster Squad", where a team of Mickey Cohen's associates assaults an inhabited movie showing by breaking through auditorium's canvas with open machine gun fire. Reshoots took place by the end of August 2012 to fill-in into the resulting gaps in the otherwise completed editorial.The months after; towards the newly-scheduled U.S. release date on January 11th 2013, Director Ruben Fleischer, still fighting for a directorial signature of his own, the producers Bruce Berman as long-term executive at Village Roadshow Picture and Kevin McCormick as well as further Warner Bros. executives did the best they could to fix the picture around the lost sequence, which resulted into a fast-paced scene-to-scene continuity-neglecting editorial under supervision of highly experienced editors Alan Baumgarten and James Herbert, utilizing razor-sharp cinematography by Dion Beebe and state of the art digital enhancements with further strong emphasize on color corrections making "Gangster Squad" visual splendor to watch, even though the concluding confrontation of the characters Mickey Cohen and John O'Mara came out bloody and realism-seeking, yet the final choreography of the fist fight seems under-developed, missing a finish upper-cut punch with visual extravaganza of the opening phantom-camera high speed capturing of actor Sean Penn boxing / working a sandbag, leaving the picture in a state of over-sugared happy endings of short-lived entertainment.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)

My senses were assaulted by the miserable excuse for a film today.New words have to be invented to describe how mind-numbingly dreadful this piece of garbage is.There is no cliché or stereotype you can think of that is not present here.Professional lox, Josh Brolin, scowls throughout the movies in what he apparently thought was how a supposedly tough cop acted.The other actors failed to even meet the low standard set by Brolin.The exception is Sean Penn whose portrayal of Mickey Cohen was redolent of ham but leagues ahead of the rest of the performers.Although I had never seen "Gangster Squad" before, the script was so hackneyed and trite that I knew how every scene would end as soon as it started.They even stuck an Abbott & Costello gag in there ("Post Office is a kid's game", "Not the way I play it")Senseless and ludicrous gunfights abound here. One gunfight scene had a hood holding and firing a Thompson sub-machine gun in each hand without a bit of recoil from the very powerful gun.This film is unbelievably bad. Not in the so-bad-it's-good way either but in the dreadful I-can't-wait-for-it-to end way.There is not one redeeming quality to this film.Every copy of this film should be gathered up and burned.

I'm sorry to say, but I had expected much more from this, I was thinking somewhere between the untouchables and the Mafia games :) The Trailer and the posters and more or less everything, just had the vibe, the clothes, music, scenery, good and bad guys, the movie was all that but it missed out on being truly great, it wasn't all serious drama as would have been best, there was some decent action, great scenes, but the real great acting comes too late in the movie.It is entertaining and enjoyable, good acting, great scenes, but it doesn't become great and it should have been more, more grand, more bold, more dramatic, well just more.