Gangster Squad

Not much liked by the critics on its theatrical release, Gangster Squad's account of the creation of an extra-legal LAPD team to take down mob boss Mickey Cohen in postwar Los Angeles perhaps suffered because it covered the same ground as James Ellroy's influential LA Quartet. But where Ellroy's novels, and the films derived from them, owe their pervasive atmosphere of corruption and moral ambiguity to film noir, Gangster Squad channels the more straightforward world of the gangster B-movie and Dragnet, where the line between the good guys and the bad guys is always clear.

Viewed in this light the film is an enjoyable, slick, violent, and lightweight pastiche, where the all-star cast play characters who can be summed up in a single line of dialogue (Josh Brolin's ex-army police captain is described as "a bull in a china shop" and that's really all you need to know). It's also fun to see a ludicrously miscast Sean Penn hamming it up unashamedly as arch-gangster Cohen.