If you’ve caught the lofty pre-publicity for Romanzo Criminale, or the promotional trailer that cites Goodfellas and Scarface, you’d be forgiven for expecting The Greatest Movie Ever Made. Sure enough, there are plenty of nods to both those films and more besides. Taking the City Of God route, a prologue introduces us to a gang of street kids in Rome stealing a car and getting up to no good. Cut to their adulthood and a botched kidnapping. Cut to multiple murders as they dispense with underworld rivals. Bam! Cut to the high priced whore cavorting on the bonnet of some equally ridiculously priced brand of car. Kapow! Cut to lines of cocaine disappearing off a glass table. Whack! Cut to bin liners full of money. Howzat! Cut to the gang getting complacent and falling apart.
Inevitably, the aforementioned high priced whore (Trinca) is sleeping with a cop (Accorsi) and a criminal (Santamaria). With similar reliability, one of the crew grows (Favino) increasingly paranoid and violent while another just wants out (Stuart). Like The Departed and any number of Hong Kong movies, this is genre boiled down to the bone. But unlike those films, only the period pop soundtrack and an underdeveloped subplot involving the death of Ado Moro alerts us to the fact that this is Italy during the seventies.
Certainly, the cocaine swoosh pacing keeps us amused and Signor Stuart is engaging as ever, but you can’t help but feel that Romanzo Criminale has an encyclopaedia of crime cinema where its heart ought to be. Wham! Cut to film critic remembering how many times she's seen it all before.