wespain

I'll admit that a major pet-peeve is any movie being blatantly inaccurate when accuracy is readily available with a little decent research. Anonymous is so false in so many ways it would waste too much time to name them all. Sure, you can take certain liberties for the sake of a story arc, but the script is so over-the-top wrong it drives right into a ditch. And what's especially worrisome is that unsuspecting viewers might buy all this malarkey as truth. Shakespeare as illiterate? Are you kidding me? Queen Elizabeth, a long reigning and strong monarch, as a dupe to slimy obsequious advisers whose motives are totally obvious? Ridiculous. Well-known historic and literary figures like Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare himself, played as petty sniveling punks? Really? Other historic figures distorted completely out of their true contexts? This movie bombed for good reasons.

This film looked mildly interesting on Netflix so we ordered it. The first serious problem? No sub-titles. Why, you ask, would someone need titles for an English-language movie? The accents, mate! I'd actually spent time in England and I could understand maybe 50% of the dialogue. The thick Northern English dialect was incomprehensible to my wife. This isn't the filmmaker's fault as much as a distributor releasing it on the cheap. But then again, as dreary as the film turned out to be I can't imagine it ever had much of an audience. The plot turns slowly around rail workers who had a nifty deal under British Rail, forced to adjust when the government got tired to subsidizing a state rail system and sold it off to private investors.

This cartoon-like mess reminds me of another failed LA crime movie from some years ago called Mulholland Falls, which involved "The Hat Squad." So maybe this is merely the dumb cribbing from the dumb. There have been plenty of good and great Los Angeles noir films, but this sure ain't one of them. And poor Nick Nolte! He was also in the aforementioned Mulholland Falls, so he's a two-time loser. Where to start at how bad Gangster Squad really is. For starters it makes a complete hash of real-life characters like Mickey Cohen. Anyone who knows the real history of Cohen's era also knows how inaccurately this film portrays it. If you want to see something that does this period right try Chinatown. I don't know what the director was going for here. Nothing is period accurate except some of the music.