A surprisingly great film; I expected a kind of aged Casino, a Scorsese best-of with De Niro, Keitel, Pesci and of course The Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’, but it’s actually a very solid, entertaining work. The film follows De Niro’s Frank Sheeran, a mob enforcer who ends up protecting and then betraying Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa; the last half hour depicting his decline into old age. It’s so quintessentially Scorsese that he even uses de aging CGI to use De Niro, Keitel, and Pesci rather than simply looking around for age-appropriate actors.

I had two criticisms: the 3 and a half hour length could have been easily cut by 20-40 minutes; and De Niro’s de ageing. For some reason, Pacino, Pesci and Keitel look perfect; but De Niro looks deeply & unnervingly strange. He doesn’t look 30-50; he looks like a 70-year-old with adept plastic surgery and cosmetics. The face is unlined but somehow weird, implausibly human; and he moves like an old man, a chubby old man at that, with no energy, no menace, no purpose, as if walking 5 meters is a bit of a challenge. His entire body language is that of a sofa-bound, portly old man’s. No CGI can correct this.

There is, in addition, something on the edge of evil about this De Niro; it’s not merely that his character is a killer – the character himself should be one of Scorsese’s amiable psychopaths. But I found him unsettlingly inhuman. I’m not sure if it’s the CGI or knowing what I think I know about De Niro as a Cabal tool, but watching him is no longer a pleasant experience: it feels evil, he feels evil.

There is however much else to enjoy. Pacino and Pesci look totally natural, Pacino could pass for his 1995 Heat‘s Vincent Hanna, and whereas De Niro looks like a horror movie figure Pacino’s character is very human, a masterpiece of cinema. For the most part, De Niro gives a good but eerily evil performance, from which I recoiled; Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa is by contrast one of the great figures of cinema, indeed I thought this one of Pacino’s truly great performances, up there with his Michael Corleone. It’s a pity the rest of the film doesn’t rise to Pacino’s peak, but then few films could.