The Untouchables (1987).
Directed by Brian DePalma.
With: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Robert De Niro, Charles Martin Smith, Andy Garcia, Billy Drago, Patricia Clarkson, Del Close.
Colour
119 min.
source: filmaffinity.com/us/film520318.html
Spoiler Alert. Everything that happens on the screen is a lie. Well, kind of. The Untouchables (1987) is the classic example of "based on true events" movies. Like those drinks that are advertised as "natural juice from squeezed oranges" and contains 10 percent fruit juice. The rest: dyes, preservatives, and even recycled waste ( whatever that means).
Here is an example, the film shows us that Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) has a daughter and his wife is pregnant with a boy, who is born at the end of the film. How nice, but not in real life Ness had a son, only one, zero daughters, and was adopted.
But hey,we have a good story, who wants reality. The film entertains, and also has an interesting cast. We have Sean Connery, who even as a fictional policeman won an Oscar.
And to Robert De Niro, who chose to make an Al Capone that looks little or nothing like the real one, but still continues to give us a masterclass in acting.
Another one who is very good is Charles Martin Smith, who plays the accountant who discovers that Capone is stealing money from the treasury and by the way, in real life, he is not killed by the mafia.
Costner puts on the same face as always, the same as Andy Garcia. But they don't get in the way of a great movie, and that's what's important.
Anyway, I repeat: things were not like that.
Frank Nitti didn't die falling off a roof, no sir. And neither did Hitler die massacred by bullets in a cinema, which does not mean that Inglourious Basterds (2010) is one of Tarantino's most enjoyable films. Likewise, The Untouchables opts for what should have been instead of what was, and ends up being a comic book fantasy that is nonetheless (or perhaps because of it) entertaining.
source: filmaffinity.com/us/film520318.html
