Avis des critiques

A meandering Goodfellas-style narration, growled to camera by Frank, fails to boost the film’s flagging energy, and since De Niro’s approach is to deliver two very slightly different but equally hammy performances, the whole dual-role gimmick is more distracting than interesting.

[The Alto Knights] delivers a lot of exposition — you might even learn some basic mafia history watching it — but it rushes through characters and incidents with such awkward abandon that one wonders if it was hacked to pieces from something larger, or if it was maybe never a fully realized work to begin with.

The Alto Knights certainly has the off-screen pedigree you’d hope for... But the circuitous shaping feels off, a problem Barry Levinson’s direction is too flaccid to fix. Nothing more exciting occurs than the botched hit... meaning that the alleged climax... is laden with more strain that it can stand.

[The Alto Knights] proceeds with all the plodding style and slack suspense of a cable TV documentary about a falling-out between members of a heavy metal hair band. Call it “Behind the Murders.”

Despite the alluring premise, nothing in Levinson’s predictable and all-too-familiar film offers anything that feels particularly new... “The Alto Knights” plays less like an ode to a genre than a wheezing retread.

It’s a serviceable plot, though sorely lacks the explosive tension-and-release and cathartic mayhem you might have expected from a Scorsese-ised version of it... This is director Barry Levinson’s first movie in a decade, so there’s a faint air of veterans-drifting-into-the-sunset about proceedings, much as there is with its on-screen protagonists.

It’s only [De Niro's] own bravado that keeps The Alto Knights interesting... [The actor] can make recognizable traits seem fresh — that’s his gift — but director Barry Levinson doesn’t give The Alto Knights the ethnic essence and cinematic flair of a Scorsese flick.

De Niro may be singing a familiar tune in his latest roles, yet he also attempts, and largely achieves, a tricky two-part harmony. His double casting is an impressive stunt, somehow both meaningless and mesmerizing... There are many fascinating tales tucked away, but “The Alto Knights” is too hurried to unpack them; it settles for spraying chunks of them at the screen.

The violence is frequent, but much of “The Alto Knights"... will feel almost, well, cozy. Several of the camera setups in the movie look to have been cribbed from “Goodfellas,” by way of tribute, one supposes... But while it’s inevitable that some, maybe many, viewers will find the dual role a distraction, those who hunger for De Niro in mobster mode will get more than their fill.

This doubling down on De Niro seems to have been where the inspiration both begun and ended. The Alto Knights may have its share of talent spread around... But all of it is simply at the service of one long retread of very well-trod ground. You’d swear that this was simply reverse-engineered to play every single Sunday Afternoon Mafia Movie Marathon on a second-rate cable channel in perpetuity, and its ambitions stopped there.

There is a certain lack of youthful vitality in [The Alto Knights]... Mr. Pileggi, who co-wrote “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” knows how to tell a thrilling crime story, but this script is merely a collection of gangster anecdotes and clichés.

There’s so much mobsplaining in the film-maker’s messy true-life Mafia movie that it often feels like Robert De Niro is aggressively reading a Wikipedia entry. Citation! ... The grand casting gambit of pitching De Niro against De Niro proves an unnecessary distraction.