10. THE GODFATHER PART 2

This is not a great movie, nor is it a great screenplay. This was a cash grab.

It's not a bad movie, per se. How could it be? You have Coppola in his prime, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, even Lee Strasburg! You have a large budget, which allows a variety of top-notch technicians and department heads.

What you don't have is a compelling story, or one that comes remotely close to the brilliance of the first film. But it exists to give backstory to a character who doesn't need it and to further another character's story in a way that we don't require.

We follow two storylines, intercutting between them: Michael Corleone, who has taken over his father's mafia business and moved it to Nevada; and his father, Don Vito Corleone, as he immigrates to America and beings his rise to power in New York in the early 1900's.

The parallels between those two storylines are tenuous at best, the time frames don't match up (Vito's story takes place over many years, Michael's is shorter), and character arcs happen out of the blue.

On that last point, the arc of Vito from poor, hard-working immigrant to low-level gangster to killer to kingpin is too fast, unexplained, and unbelievable. We never see a lightbulb moment where he makes his choice. We never see him starving, or in peril himself. We never get a sense of his motivation, other than that we already know he becomes a mobster later. He becomes a killer because it's convienent to the plot.

Contrast this with the superior first film, where Michael's motivation to kill for the first time, thus changing the course of his life, are shown to us clearly, and are both primal and twofold: he's protecting his father; he's exacting revenge.

The final act, after a perfunctory Don Vito return to Sicily to kill the man that killed his mother, we get an intercut killing of all of Michael's foes, including Hyman Roth at the Miami Airport, as well as Michael's brother Fredo. This is an echo of the first film's intercut killing, contrasted with a baptism. Again, the first film is superior in this regard, because that contrast between good and evil, light and dark, works in the context of the film, and the character's motivations made that scene make sense: Michael was using the baptism as an alibi so that he couldn't be implicated in the slaughter.

Here, he's just being cruel, and in a way that doesn't make sense: he could have had Fredo killed in Cuba and been much less culpable, we're honestly expected to believe he's more eager to have Hyman killed in America, at a busy airport, rather than abroad, and he somehow has the power to have Tom convince someone to kill himself in prison?

And then we get Michael alone, with nothing but his memories of the time his father was to come home, the time he enlisted in the Army. I, for one, felt nothing for him. I watched the credits, dumbfounded about how this could be considered great cinema. A few weeks later, I was vindicated: Francis Ford Coppola: There Should've Only Been ONE 'Godfather' Movie.

Here are a few posts that echo my disappointment:

* Movie Rapture
* dfuse.in
* Roger Ebert