Sean Penn is Mickey Cohen, a brutal mobster. Sergeant John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) is a World War II veteran who leads a team of cops (including Ryan Gosling) to hunt him down. Emma Stone is Cohen’s girlfriend and “social etiquette teacher”, who becomes attached to Gosling, putting both of them in great danger.
It’s exciting when there’s action taking place, and the chase and shoot-out sequences are exceedingly well filmed, but it's let down by a sub-standard script. The characters aren’t really developed, so you don’t see any of these excellent actors at their best. The group scenes are especially flat, with no one seeming to have anything to say. Even the Stone/Gosling pair-up – so potent in La La Land – fails to sparkle.
There’s an interesting theme about the war not yet being over, and O’Mara not knowing what else to do but fight. Oddly enough, the most three-dimensional character is Connie (Mireille Enos), his pregnant wife, who goes from warning him about the dangers of what he’s doing to hand-picking the “gangster squad” who work with him.
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