My wife and I kicked off the new year with Gangster Squad, hoping it would be better than last year’s kick off movie, The Grey. Admittedly, it’s not too hard to be better than The Grey – all you need is scenes of something other than dudes running through the snow yelling “Oh Fuck! Oh Fuck!” as a bunch of wolves closes in on them, takes down rearmost guy, and rips him to pieces. But I’m happy to report that Gangster Squad cleared the hurdle with room to spare. It’s a fun movie. Not great, but fun.

I have to laugh when movies flash “inspired by true events” on the screen at the beginning, because it basically means they’re free to make up whatever shit they want to. I always thought Micky Cohen when to Alcatraz for tax evasion, and a quick check reveals that this is indeed true. Here, a vigilante squad of cops wages illegal gorilla warfare on Cohen, and eventually nails him in a much more colorful and cinematic way – whatever, I’m no stickler for slavishly sticking to anything, and I’m not super interested in how much of this vigilante story is actually true. What matters is: did they do a good job telling it?

On one level, they did. The story definitely holds your attention, mainly because the squad itself is interestingly (and believably) incompetent, which add a lot of surprising variations to the action. They even made an attempt at a set-up – when the squad is put together – and although they didn’t do it very well (rushing it, adding a bit too much ham,) it did focus the story to a certain extent. And Sean Penn is so fabulous he grounds the entire movie and makes up for some of the acting and writing shortcomings in the rest of the film – more on him later.

But on another level, I had certain issues. The gun play is overdone, and becomes tiresome by the end. I found the CGI bullshit very distracting, including the incredibly fake computer-generated landscape shots of LA. The humor is really nothing I will be longing to re-experience. The set-up, while perhaps minimally adequate, was really crap when compared to a very similar, almost identical movie experience like LA Confidential. Come to think of it, the cinematography, dialog and acting look pretty crappy compared to something like LA Confidential. I’m not saying Gangster Squad is bad – it’s an entertaining story and a fun time at the movies. But it must be pointed out that it falls way short in a lot of areas, provided you don’t limit your comparisons to current cinema.

Now for the acting. Sean Penn yet again proves (as I’m fond of saying) that he is the greatest actor of his generation, by far. He gives us a Micky Cohen that makes your blood run cold, not so much through the flamboyant quotable lines and generic mobster violence of his character, but through the rest of his performance, the subtle menacing nuance of his regular everyday speech and body language. It’s amazing that Penn could get this all across while at the same time doing the hammy hollywood shit the script called for.

As for the squad, Josh Brolin is an actor I don’t really like. But it seems to me that the less he has to say and emote, the better he comes off – think the guy he played in No Country for Old Men, that’s his sweet spot. Here he plays a rather stupid and belligerent oaf who leads the squad through various forms of mayhem, and he fits the role pretty well. Ryan Gosling is another actor I don’t really like, although he is a good looking guy to be sure. But again, here I liked him playing a conflicted playboy of sorts (with hidden depths.) The others are at worst tolerable, not too distracting. And Emma Stone is her usual, strange-looking self as the third leg of a love triangle.

I would recommend Gangster Squad, for a fun story and for Sean Penn’s performance, with the caveat that you’re going to be listening to a lot of machine guns before the night is through.