One of the great beauties of this film is the authenticity of the people in it. Many of the actors show marks of lived hardship, struggle, and endurance. They are portraying roles informed by their own personal struggles fraught with unrealistic expectations and insurmountable individual and external challenges. The film's story helps to show that crime does not pay. It is not a film that glorifies being a gangster, the impossible success story that Hollywood might pretend exists, but portrays more a snapshot of an immigrant thug from a complicated Albanian culture and history facing the humble realities and disappointments of becoming a middle-aged small-time has-been, and the resentments and anger that might arise when unrealistic expectations for power and success go unfulfilled while walking down a path of destruction.
Review of Albanian Gangster
