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Year: 2020
Rating: R
Length: 103 minutes / 1.72 hours

To give you a sense of the quality of this movie, I received a copy to own Capone (2020) for free from Redbox. The fact that Redbox was the distributor for this movie should have been the first indication of how bad it was going to be. At first, I figured, “Oh, a movie about Al Capone. That should be interesting, right? And Tom Hardy is in it? He’s done some great stuff.” How wrong I was. Now it’s my job to warn you about it.

Perhaps the director, Josh Trank, was to blame for this mess of a movie. Sure, his first film, Chronicle (2012), was pretty good, but Fantastic Four (2015) showed this to be a fluke, and Capone put the last nail in the coffin for his career. I mean, how can you take such an interesting historical figure like Al Capone (Tom Hardy) and focus on all the wrong parts of his life? On the other hand, maybe the goal was to humanize him by making the audience aware of the bodily failings of an older man? Whatever the case, the result was mostly just gross, confusing, and ultimately unentertaining.

I can recognize that choosing to document the end of Al Capone’s life is a bold choice. However, unless there are snippets of his illustrious past sprinkled throughout the film (in the form of flashbacks or other storytelling methods), it forces the audience to sit through the boring parts of this man’s last days. And perhaps, that was the point? We can sometimes idolize villains like Al Capone, so watching his steady deterioration toward death can bring him down from the cultural pedestal we have collectively placed him on. Unfortunately, regardless of what was trying to be done here, it failed miserably.

A mess of a biopic that focuses on the wrong parts of Al Capone’s life, I give Capone 1.5 stars out of 5.

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