Gangster Squad (2013)

Gangster Squad arrives in 1949 Los Angeles with a fedora tilted low and a tommy gun under each arm, and it means to have a good time. Ruben Fleischer's picture concerns a secret unit of LAPD officers tasked with dismantling Mickey Cohen's criminal empire by methods the department cannot officially acknowledge. The screenplay, adapted loosely from Paul Lieberman's nonfiction book, treats history as a suggestion. Chief Parker, played by Nick Nolte at roughly the age of a monument, did not create the unit. Cohen's rackets are rearranged. Men who lived to 2012 die in the third act. The most telling liberty is the squad itself, which the film staffs with Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña alongside its white leads. The real unit was entirely Caucasian. The substitution is made without a word of comment, which is at least a tidy way of doing it.

Elsewhere the film's cultural ledger is close to blank. Emma Stone's Grace Faraday is a gangster's moll who exists to be rescued and kissed. Mireille Enos plays a pregnant wife who hands out sandwiches and encouragement. Nobody in the film has anything to say about race, though two of the heroes are not white, and nothing to say about class, though the villain is a businessman and the heroes are cops. There is no environmental conscience, no body-positive framing, no neurodivergent character, no queer subtext. The film is not interested. It wants shootouts in Chinatown and a fistfight in a fountain.

What we are left with is a handsome, hollow, thoroughly watchable piece of pulp. It lectures no one. It has no sermon to deliver and no lesson to impart, and in an era of cinema that frequently mistakes a pamphlet for a screenplay, there is a certain relief in that. The film fabricates history for the sake of a better gunfight, an old and dishonorable Hollywood tradition, not a political project. We score it accordingly, with a mild nod to its quietly integrated ensemble and a longer look at its cheerful disregard for the record. It is a film with a body count.