werkz advice: only for die hard daniel day-lewis and scorsese fans.

Gangs of New York bills itself as an epic covering one of New York City's most turbulent periods. With an all-star cast, plenty of chaos and violence, a famous director and a boat-load of witty one-liners from Daniel Day-Lewis (playing a character called "The Butcher"), you'd think the movie would rock. It did not, for several reasons.

Although parts of the movie are quite good, and The Butcher himself is a complex villain who gets all the best lines and provokes the most thought afterwards, most of the film is simply tedious. Shots are thrown in for no reason, and given the amount of production nightmares the film went through, it's possible that the deletion of some scenes simply made others make no sense. When Leo DiCaprio's character (let's face it...it's easier to remember the actors as actors than as characters in this film, whether it's Cameron Diaz as a short prostitute or Jim Broadbent as the overly effeminate Boss Tweed) arranges to kill the Butcher with poison...why later does he try to knife him? Why do we need to see a two-second scene with the Butcher and several prosititutes, nestled between two shots of DiCaprio in bed with Diaz? What do the riots have to do with the gangs themselves, and are the rioters immigrants or New Yorkers or simple segregationists?

I've heard the book is quite good, and I can imagine it weaves the narrative flow far better than Scorsese, who seems to delight in scenes of violence with little purpose intermixed with long protracted scenes of people being frustrated. At the end, one is left wondering what the purpose, if any, was, other than to advance Day-Lewis's stalled career. And, to be sure, he gets all the best scenes, all the best lines, and all the craziest outfits. GONY actually looks at points like a bad music video, with entire armies of men outfitted in plaid pants and top hats arrayed against a rabble of neanderthals clutching dead rabbits and giant crosses. Perhaps this was historical accuracy, yet it still seemed over-the-top to have such a clear divide between each group. It reminds me of how a high-schooler might dress the different factions at school, with goths wearing leather outfits designed by Marilyn Manson, preppies dressed as if they walked out of J Crew and slackers all wearing Vans, baggy shorts and long chains to their wallets. In reality, no group can ever be so uniform, yet in charicature, each person becomes like the others in the pack.

In the end, it was a spectacle to see. But over the course of three hours, I'd need a better spectacle (Lord of the Rings, anyone?) to hold my interest. Some reviewers lauded the end of the film (which shows a series of still images of New York over the years, ending with a shot including the World Trade Center towers still standing) as a neat way of connecting the violence of the two times together. This is absurd: in the film the Butcher murders people in plain daylight with an axe and plenty of onlookers and is warned by Boss Tweed that he shouldn't do such things. Violence then, at least, was commonplace. Now, we view such things as an anomaly. Much like this film, which set against other historical epics might seem average, yet when compared to its current competition seems positively mediocre.