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With a career that goes back seven decades, Robert De Niro has made an impact on just about every genre, but he’ll always be viewed as a legend from gangster films. From The Godfather Part II to Once Upon A Time In America to The Untouchables to Goodfellas and more, he is a star who has an outsized impact on the history of organized impact in cinema, and it’s an unignorable aspect of his oeuvre.
The Alto Knights
Release Date: March 21, 2025
Directed By: Barry Levinson
Written By: Nicholas Pileggi
Starring: Robert De Niro, Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis, Kathrine Narducci, Michael Rispoli
Rating: R for violence and pervasive language
Runtime: 120 minutes
If this reflection feels familiar, it’s because it’s one movie-lovers analyzed a great deal relatively recently around the release of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. In 2019, the film ended up being worthy of the legacy talk, as it’s an epic on a tier with De Niro’s best – but six years later, Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights feels like a drop of poison in the well. You don’t want to think about the actor’s history in the genre in concert with it because it has no positive contributions.
On top of Robert De Niro starring in a new gangster movie, the gimmick here is that the star plays dual roles, but the fact that this ends up being a very badly executed gimmick is only part of the film’s problems. Constantly dumping out exposition and the story dragging at a snail’s pace, the narrative lacks even the most remote concept of energy and never delivers a single satisfying sequence (despite coming from two filmmaking greats in Levinson and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi). Practically every scene drags out two minutes longer than necessary, the dialogue so stilted and empty that it feels like bad improv, and while it occasionally tricks you into thinking something interesting is coming around the corner, nothing of the sort ever materializes.
Robert De Niro plays both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese – major New York City crime figures through the middle decades of the 20th century. While the two men grew up together and long see each other as best friends, their dynamic changes when Vito flees the country to avoid criminal charges and leaves his criminal enterprise in Frank’s hands to control.
Everything in the underworld is running smoothly thanks to Frank’s leadership, but when Vito returns to the United States, the edgy, quick-tempered gangster not only wants his power back, but he wants to introduce hard drugs into the business. Amenable, Frank cedes some power, but their conflict continues to escalate – heat added by government investigations into organized crime – until the point where Vito puts out a hit on his childhood pal that ends up being botched.
In a year full of dual performances, Robert De Niro seriously underwhelms.
Between Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights, Theo James in The Monkey, Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, and Michael B. Jordan in the upcoming Sinners, audiences are seeing a lot of dual performances on the big screen in the first half of 2025. De Niro’s turn will not be remembered as a highlight of the trend.
Part of the problem is the general approach; unlike all of the other movies mentioned above, Frank Costello and Vito Genovese are not brothers or twins or clones, and as independent people, there is not enough distinguishing them to make the dual performance interesting. Vito is a hothead and wears dark glasses everywhere, and Frank is more relaxed and has a bit more hair. That’s pretty much the full extent of it. Mostly, you’re just actively aware of De Niro trying to pull off a dual performance and the job not getting done.
The forced scenes where the two characters interact one-on-one are wholly unreal – and not just because of the clear efforts to otherwise make the sequences as simple as possible (the two men generally sitting on opposite sides of restaurant tables and left undisturbed ). With editing sharing some of the blame, it’s never convincing that they having a natural conversation; the attempted dual performance is constantly transparent, and it never lets you engage with the content of the interaction.
The story in The Alto Knights is terribly uninteresting, and the dialogue is maddening.
To be fair, the distraction of De Niro’s double work is somewhat welcome in the sense that it’s something to actively contemplate as scene after scene of dull conversations unfurl. There are what feel like a dozen scenes that play out with this rhythm:
“He doesn’t trust you.”
“He doesn’t trust me?”
“He doesn’t trust you.”
“What do you mean he doesn’t trust me?
“He doesn’t trust you because of that thing you did.”
“How could he not trust me because of that thing I did? How dare he!”
“What can I say? He doesn’t trust you.”
If I’m being generous, I’d say that it’s a swing at natural, off-the-cuff dialogue, but they drag on excessively and are of so little substance that you find yourself mentally begging for the film to move on.
Adding insult to injury is the laziness of the storytelling. It’s bad enough that the movie takes the shortcut of an in medias res opening by starting the first act with the failed assassination of Frank Costello (easily the most interesting thing that happens in the two-hour runtime), but the story is also spoon fed to the audience with Frank providing constant voiceover narration explaining what is happening (the film also frequently cuts to shots of him telling his story directly into the camera that are ultimately given zero context). Like Robert De Niro, Nicholas Pileggi is a legend in the gangster genre – his credits including Goodfellas and Casino – but The Alto Knights is a title to be forgotten from his filmography.
While I don’t like to give away spoilers in reviews, this is a film where the big third act climax is a bunch of crime bosses fleeing a gathering when they spot police officers writing down license plate numbers; meanwhile, the protagonist is killing time going to roadside fruit stand on his way to the meeting. The Alto Knights looks like it had the potential to be a genre classic on paper, but the execution leaves one wanting in just about every respect, and I’m willing to bet that anyone who sees it on the big screen will be challenged to remember details from it in a year’s time.
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