Aside from Golden Agers like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, it’s hard to think of a star more closely associated with the gangster genre than Robert De Niro. He broke through as a low-level thug in Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and solidified his mob movie bona fides as the young version of Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part II.”
De Niro is obviously far from a one-note gangster pony, but with iconic performances in Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” and Scorsese’s ’90s crime duo of “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” he hasn’t shied away from such roles. After parodying his wise guy persona in “Analyze This” (good) and “Analyze That” (awful), he generally took a break from genre (at least as far as high-profile movies were concerned) until Scorsese came calling with his long-gestating passion project “The Irishman.” Would this be De Niro’s gangster swan song? Right about now, he probably wishes it had been.
A Nicholas Pileggi-penned film about the hostilities between the Genovese and Luciano crime families sounded promising on paper. The writer was an established expert of the genre on the strength of his “Goodfellas” and “Casino” scripts. So, Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav likely figured he was making a safe bet when he set Barry Levinson to direct Pileggi’s screenplay with De Niro in dual roles as crime bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Perhaps this would be just the thing to lure adult moviegoers back to theaters.
It wasn’t. “The Alto Knights” was an embarrassing flop that received mostly negative reviews (plus a meh B Cinemascore). As for why you should give this 2025 bomb a look while it’s streaming on Prime Video? You’re undoubtedly thinking the movie sounds eminently skippable, but it’s actually a useful study in creative hackery.
Read more: All 20 Coen Brothers Movies, Ranked
The Alto Knights does De Niro a grave disservice
Robert De Niro sits in a diner playing both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese in The Alto Knights – Warner Bros.
In truth, “The Alto Knights” was a guaranteed loser. Initially titled “Wise Guys,” the project began making the Hollywood rounds in the 1970s, but every major studio passed on it. Thus, Pileggi stuffed the script back in his drawer and went on to write two of the greatest gangster movies ever made. But even after those films became classics of the form, there was no renewed interest in his Genovese-Luciano crime saga.
Decades later, when Zaslav (who claims he’s a movie lover, contrary to his attempted gutting of Turner Classic Movies) found himself running the most distinguished studio in town, he opted to do his Hamptons lunch buddy Pileggi a solid by reanimating his corpse of a screenplay. Had it been 1988, teaming Levinson and De Niro on a gangster flick would’ve been a huge deal. In 2022, when the film went into production, it reeked of rich dude chuminess.
“The Alto Knights” sat on a shelf for over a year before it arrived DOA in multiplexes on March 21, 2025. It’s a maddeningly phoned-in movie. De Niro does the bare minimum to distinguish Costello from Genovese, but it’s a far cry from how, in “The Irishman,” he seamlessly adjusted his physicality to take the titular hitman, Frank Sheeran, from the prime of his life to a scared, one-foot-in-the-grave failure of a man. There’s no pep in Levinson’s step and, visually, “The Alto Knights” is yet another sad reminder that cinematographer Dante Spinotti has nothing left in the tank. It’s the filmmaking equivalent of watching an old-timers’ baseball game.
Take note of the staging and pacing, and you’ll wonder what happened to these lions of the industry. It’s called getting old, and it’s dramatized to painful perfection in “The Irishman.”
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