7 Years Ago, Netflix Released The Last Gangster Movie Masterpiece

Where would Hollywood be without gangster movies? From iconic early efforts like Scarface, Angels with Dirty Faces and The Public Enemy to second-half-of-the-20th-century classics The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Once Upon a Time in America, the gangster genre has delivered time and time again. Careers were made on both sides of the camera: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, the list goes on.

The genre doesn’t appear to be as dominant as it once was. The 2000s started strongly with the likes of American Gangster, City of God, and The Departed, but quickly fell away as the 2010s came into view. Indeed, the last truly brilliant gangster movie came via Netflix seven whole years ago.

The Irishman Was The Last Truly Great Gangster Movie

Jesse Plemons as Chuckie with the rest of the cast from the Irishman including Ray Romono, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro

The Irishman could be considered the final boss of gangster movies. A sprawling (some might say too sprawling) epic combining the talents of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci, the 2019 effort was Martin Scorsese’s modernized throwback to the gangster movies of yore. And despite the big-name talents involved, The Irishman still exceeded the sum of its parts.

The decade-spanning rise-and-fall narrative had weight and substance, the performances brought morally-questionable characters to life with vivid complexity, and Scorsese’s direction made an inherently personal story beautifully cinematic in its scope. By rights, The Irishman should have been a disaster. With years in development hell behind it, a running time easily eclipsing the three-hour mark, and a heavy reliance on de-aging technology, the odds were firmly stacked against Scorsese and co.

By the time the final credits rolled, however, most would have left The Irishman feeling like the mammoth runtime was completely necessary, and the digital makeovers tastefully executed. As he did with The Departed and Goodfellas, Scorsese once again burrowed behind the violence to find the human stories, and it was that emotional hook that made Frank Sheeran’s story so very compelling from start to toilet break to finish.

Was The Irishman A Farewell To Epic Gangster Movies?

Frank (Robert De Niro) in a retirement home in The Irishman

There’s a meta interpretation of The Irishman that may explain why there hasn’t been another gangster movie in the same mold since. The narrative is framed through the eyes of De Niro’s elderly gangster recalling his past from a nursing home. His memories take the viewer from Sheeran’s very first taste of organized crime right up to the film’s present-day.

It’s a darkly comic tragedy, and as De Niro’s protagonist says goodbye to his life of crime by going through his greatest hits, it’s hard not to think Scorsese and his cohorts are doing the same. One last gangster saga to end them all – the familiar faces, the classic tropes, the same emotions. It all has the air of being Hollywood’s grand farewell to this revered style of movie. As a spiritual successor to masterpieces like The Godfather and Goodfellas, The Irishman can’t help but feel like an aging rock band doing one last stadium gig.

Since The Irishman, we’ve seen plenty of crime thrillers and films with gangsters in them, but nothing that could be mentioned alongside the genre’s true greats, nor anything that has seriously dared to reach such heights. Hollywood is crying out for a filmmaker who can take the template and polish it for the 2020s with an ambitious mafia drama, thus proving The Irishman was not the end of an era for gangster movies.