Plenty of films have tried to trace the downfall of the Italian mafia in America. It’s a familiar story—family ties fray, Cosa Nostra loses its code, and eventually, the cracks run so deep that the family collapses under the weight of its greed and ego, leaving the door wide open for the Feds. From The Godfather (1972) to The Sopranos, we’ve about seen it all. But 82-year-old director Barry Levinson attempts to zero in on something more intimate: the slow betrayal between two lifelong friends, where greed rips apart the mob from the inside out.
Robert De Niro pulls double duty as Frank Costello, the boss of bosses who narrates the story, and Vito Genovese, another high-profile mobster—and Costello’s childhood best friend. Costello is portrayed as a steady hand, a respected man in New York City who keeps the peace after Lucky Luciano is locked up. But when Vito returns from hiding out on murder charges, he wants more—especially permission to run a heroin operation. Frank sees drugs as the mob’s downfall, but Vito is too hungry for power to care. Their friendship fractures, tensions boil over, and it all leads to a botched hit on Frank, ordered by Vito himself.
The fumbled assassination could be considered a turning point for the mob, a representation of the internal distrust that unraveled everything the Italian American mafia built. Tethered to a tragic story of two friends, the film seems poised to deliver a poignant take. However, The Alto Knights plays more like a dry History Channel special than a pulse-pounding mob movie. This is largely because of the narration, where De Niro’s Costello recalls the downfall with an off-key somberness—a far cry from the reflective storytelling of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (1990). This is compounded by the stiff dialogue between the two De Niros. Vito feels like he was written for De Niro’s longtime screenmate, Joe Pesci, but instead comes across as De Niro playing Pesci playing Vito.
Though clearly aimed at mob movie fans, The Alto Knights ends up recycling too many of the same familiar stories. To its credit, one of its successes is its portrayal of the Apalachin meeting, the event that signaled public recognition of organized crime across the United States. The sequence becomes one of the film’s most gripping moments, as 60-plus mob bosses lose their nerve while the police storm the convention. Yet, it underscores a larger issue in The Alto Knights: It feels like Levinson is trying to do what the later generations of the mafia sought—to claim his own slice of the pie, just a little too late. R, 120 min.
Wide release in theaters
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