There's a lot in this film that was interesting and eye-opening (like the Jewish mob's attacks on the German American Bund. Wow. I did not know about that!) but imo, weak direction and a poorly achieved 'Scorsese' style moral ambiguity flattened what might have been a truly challenging tale. I really like Harvey Keitel and Sam Worthington, but there's no real chemistry established between them. When Keitel tells Worthington he has nothing to worry about because 'he likes him', it's just words. That sense of trusting relationship hasn't really been established, it was just 'depicted'. At any rate, I don't think either actor had a lot to work with here. All the characters are a little wooden, some are borderline 'mobster' caricatures. And in general I really have a problem with films that play as apologetics for killers. The mob is a bloody business and there are no good guys in it. And the FBI bashing was typical and tedious. The things those guys have to go through to build a case would drive most people crazy. Batista was a bloody dictator who committed acts of mass murder and threw bodies into the streets but there's not a hint of that here. The kind of people Lansky did business with didn't just kill other mobsters. All those guys were psychopaths. The film almost puts a sheen of respectability on them. The blurb at the close of the film talks about how Lanksy's casinos generate hundreds of billions of dollars and employ millions. Yeah, well so does fast food. If the film had been better achieved, its constant attempts to make us love the guy might have been forgivable.
