Before major league baseball came to the west coast if you referred to the Mick in the Fifties it wasn't Mantle they were talking about. And Mickey Rooney was kind of eclipsed in the title. No that would have been gangster Mickey Cohen, a crude, violent, and vulgar man who ruled Los Angeles organized crime and was often at odds with quieter and less attention getting folks like Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello.
If you watched Warren Beatty's classic Bugsy you saw the genesis of Cohen's character played there by Harvey Keitel. After the contract hit on Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel in 1947, Cohen became number one in organized crime on the West Coast. Sean Penn picks up on that character and puts his own particular stamp on Cohen. As a performer Penn amazes me at the range of what he can play. Ironically at 5'9" Penn is two short to have played the over six foot Harvey Milk for which he won his second Oscar and he's too tall to have played 5'5" Mickey Cohen. But Penn made these parts his own and dominates both of those films.
Cohen attracts so much attention unto himself that reform police chief William Parker played by Nick Nolte has decided that he has to do nothing but declare a no quarter war in secret less civil libertarians get up in arms. So he recruits an idealistic Josh Brolin for the job. After this the plot of this film runs pretty close to Kevin Costner's The Untouchables with Brolin being far less of a boy scout than Costner was as Eliot Ness.
Wife Mireille Enos makes the useful suggestion that for this kind of disagreeable work of being LA's own secret police, Brolin needs some disagreeable people for the squad. Those he gets are Robert Patrick, Anthony Mackie, Michael Pena, Giovanni Ribisi, and cynical war veteran Ryan Gosling who makes war on Cohen real personal by moving in on his main squeeze Emma Stone. Both Stone and Enos have the only two women's roles of substance, but both prove to be critical in shaping the motivations of all the men around them.
Unlike what you see here, Mickey Cohen did not go down for first degree murder. Like Al Capone whom he tried to emulate in methods and style, Cohen was taken down by the audit boys at the IRS and like Capone did a stretch in Alcatraz. Still if you're wanting action, the final shootout between Penn and his hired guns and the Gangster Squad recruited by Brolin should more than satisfy anyone's craving.
Gangster Squad like the more fictionalized LA Confidential before it is a great depiction of a bygone era and a colorful one. And Sean Penn totally dominates this film, hitting on all levels the various the various strains in the psyche that made up Mickey Cohen.
If you watched Warren Beatty's classic Bugsy you saw the genesis of Cohen's character played there by Harvey Keitel. After the contract hit on Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel in 1947, Cohen became number one in organized crime on the West Coast. Sean Penn picks up on that character and puts his own particular stamp on Cohen. As a performer Penn amazes me at the range of what he can play. Ironically at 5'9" Penn is two short to have played the over six foot Harvey Milk for which he won his second Oscar and he's too tall to have played 5'5" Mickey Cohen. But Penn made these parts his own and dominates both of those films.
Cohen attracts so much attention unto himself that reform police chief William Parker played by Nick Nolte has decided that he has to do nothing but declare a no quarter war in secret less civil libertarians get up in arms. So he recruits an idealistic Josh Brolin for the job. After this the plot of this film runs pretty close to Kevin Costner's The Untouchables with Brolin being far less of a boy scout than Costner was as Eliot Ness.
Wife Mireille Enos makes the useful suggestion that for this kind of disagreeable work of being LA's own secret police, Brolin needs some disagreeable people for the squad. Those he gets are Robert Patrick, Anthony Mackie, Michael Pena, Giovanni Ribisi, and cynical war veteran Ryan Gosling who makes war on Cohen real personal by moving in on his main squeeze Emma Stone. Both Stone and Enos have the only two women's roles of substance, but both prove to be critical in shaping the motivations of all the men around them.
Unlike what you see here, Mickey Cohen did not go down for first degree murder. Like Al Capone whom he tried to emulate in methods and style, Cohen was taken down by the audit boys at the IRS and like Capone did a stretch in Alcatraz. Still if you're wanting action, the final shootout between Penn and his hired guns and the Gangster Squad recruited by Brolin should more than satisfy anyone's craving.
Gangster Squad like the more fictionalized LA Confidential before it is a great depiction of a bygone era and a colorful one. And Sean Penn totally dominates this film, hitting on all levels the various the various strains in the psyche that made up Mickey Cohen.