'GANGSTER SQUAD' Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling star in this L.A.-based criminal drama
Set in Los Angeles in 1949, Gangster Squad is all about how John O'Mara (Josh Brolin), a police sergeant with the fine bones of a hero and the saturnine squint of a man who has seen the dark side, launches an offensive against Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), a ragingly ambitious psycho hoodlum who wants to make L.A. his empire. O'Mara knows that with a monster like Cohen, traditional law enforcement methods won't cut it. He's going to have to get dirty. So he puts together a squad of officers — Ryan Gosling as the cute, smooth, charming one, Giovanni Ribisi as the early version of a tech nerd, and so on — who will travel around the city without badges, disrupting Cohen's rackets by using his violent tactics against him. This is one of those period underworld pictures that revel almost fetishistically in the details of the era: the long coats and fedoras and tommy guns, the iconic shots of old L.A. architecture, the ruby red lipsticks and body-hugging '40s gowns worn by Cohen's moll (Emma Stone, a little too nice for the part), the nightclub where a Carmen Miranda-like figure swivels her hips as she sings ''Chica boom! Chica boom!'' Yet beneath the luster of its costumes and set design, Gangster Squad is all guns-blazing recklessness and tinny-bloody set pieces. It's like L.A. Confidential remade as a mediocre Jason Statham film. It keeps going chica bang bang.
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