Robert De Niro Gives Two Underwhelming Performances in The Alto Knights, Which is More Gotti Than Goodfellas

This reunion between De Niro and the co-screenwriter of Goodfellas and Casino is fuhgetable!

When I saw the trailer for Alto Nights, I wondered whether it was a real movie or one of the many fake-seeming direct-to-streaming cheapies Robert De Niro makes to pay for his many divorces.

These films are primarily the odious product of Randall Emmett, the calculating hack behind a sub-genre known as the “Geezer Teaser” for his predilection for filling low-budget direct-to-streaming action movies with famous folks like Nicolas Cage, John Travolta, John Cusack, Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and De Niro.

I remember reading that legally, De Niro has to keep on working until he dies to pay off the vast fortune he owes his ex-wives. The world being what it is, De Niro will undoubtedly keep working after he dies due to the sinister magic of AI.

It reminds me of a scene in the new Alec Baldwin reality show where he has to leave his family to go to Los Angeles to facilitate the creation of a digital copy of himself. That means the long-dead Baldwin could still be doing voiceover for commercials for luxury cars centuries after his death.

It’s not a matter of De Niro wanting to work and choosing projects he is passionate about. Instead, it’s a grim march of dreary obligation.

These days, De Niro is all about quantity rather than quality. 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon served as a potent reminder that Robert De Niro was still capable of greatness with the right director, role, and material.

For much of De Niro’s career, the idea that he’d have to prove his immense talent would be laughable. Of COURSE, Rober De Niro could deliver mesmerizing performances. He’s Robert Fucking De Niro, after all, but the past two decades have been tough.

I’m seeing double! Four Robert De Niros!

The Alto Nights has a director and screenwriter of note in Barry Levinson, who previously directed De Niro in Wag the Dog and What Just Happened, and Nicholas Pileggi, the author turned screenwriter legendary for Goodfellas and Casino.

De Niro does double duty here, playing Frank Costello, a career criminal hiding his evil deeds behind a veneer of upper-middle-class respectability, and his hot-headed enforcer, Vito Genovese (also Robert De Niro).

Pileggi co-wrote Goodfellas and Casino, and executive produced The Irishman, a trio of gangster classics that paired a ferociously engaged De Niro with Joe Pesci.

De Niro and Pesci are a legendary team. Robert De Niro and Robert De Niro are a much less inspired pairing because De Niro spends the film doing a half-assed Joe Pesci impersonation. Apparently, imitating the Academy Award-winning legend is funny for De Niro; it fucking amuses him because he sees the fellow gangster icon as some kind of clown.

It feels like they sought Pesci for the role of Genovese, and when he turned it down, Levinson told him to impersonate Pesci.

If you could trademark an essence, then De Niro would owe Pesci money because he delivers a very Pesci-like performance in the Joe Pesci role of the hothead with a smart mouth and itchy trigger finger.

Meanwhile, the role of Frank Costello allows De Niro to sleepwalk through the role of another pragmatic criminal who is calm, calculating, and obsessed with appearances.

The Alto Knights opens at what only appears to be the end. We begin with Genovese ordering a hit on Costello that, at the very least, complicates their friendship.

Genovese’s stooge Vincent “The Chin” Gigante (Cosmo Jarvis) shoots Frank Costello in the head, but he miraculously survives with shockingly limited damage.

Frank knows precisely who put out the hit and why, but he’s less concerned with revenge than survival. The mild-mannered mob kingpin knows how lucky he was to survive the failed assassination attempt. He knows that he might not be as fortunate the next time around, so he resists the urge to strike back or rat out his longtime frenemy just because he tried to kill him.

Pileggi’s screenplay alternates between the grim endgame Costello and Genovese entered into when the hotheaded lunatic tried unsuccessfully to eliminate his rival permanently and flashbacks detailing their stormy relationship.

Like Goodfellas and Casino, The Alto Knights has wall-to-wall narration explaining the complicated bond between its anti-hero and villain. Levinson and Pileggi are big believers in the old maxim that you should tell rather than show and then keep telling until even the stupidest member of the audience knows what’s going on.

The Alto Knights has so much exposition to unpack that it has De Niro deliver some of it to the camera while sitting. It’s a peculiar and unfortunate choice that highlights the perverse talkiness of this endeavor.

It feels like they tried to implement a shit-ton of exposition organically, either through dialogue or voiceover narration, before giving up and deciding that the easiest way to handle things would be to have De Niro tell the audience what it needs to know.

The Alto Knight is a story about stories. It’s like Goodfellas and Casino in that respect, but there is a vast gulf between the quality of De Niro’s previous collaborations with Pileggi and this.

De Niro delivers doubly disappointing turns. His Frank Costello is sleepy and understated in his performance as an existentially exhausted mobster whose greatest goal in life is to avoid being gunned down in the street by one of Genovese’s thugs.

Frank Costello is all oily ego. He’s the acceptable face of organized crime, a bloodless bureaucrat in a business filled with murderous hoods like Genovese.

Vito Genovese, in sharp contrast, is pure id, a man of violence with an insatiable hunger for power and a bottomless capacity for brutality.

The Alto Knights feels more like a prestige HBO movie than a proper motion picture. I’d love to report that The Alto Knights marks a comeback for Levinson, who these days is better known as the father of monster Nepo Baby Sam Levinson, but this is more Gotti than Goodfellas.

Killers of the Flower Moon proved that De Niro was still capable of greatness. Unfortunately, The Alto Knights proves that he remains eminently capable of mediocrity.

Two and a half stars out of five