The Alto Knights Review: Another Scorsese Knockoff

While The Alto Knights boasts a great dual performance from Robert De Niro, the film can’t overcome its lingering Scorsese ripoff scent.

However, the attempt fails, and Frank survives, leading him to “get the message” and retire from the life of crime he undertook with Vito many years ago, but not before he gets his revenge on his former friend, and the empire he so desperately wants to control. 

Vito’s approach to crime is more direct (which means frequent bursts of excessive violence), while Frank’s plan is far more refined and meticulous. What will happen when a chess player tries to take down a man who always shoots first before making any rational decision? This is thrillingly illustrated when tensions rise between Costello and Genovese during a well-mounted courtroom scene where Frank decides to testify instead of pleading the fifth as everyone else involved in the trial did. As Vito watches the hearing on television in dissatisfaction, something is boiling inside him that’s bound to have massive repercussions for the rest of the film. However, these repercussions sparsely happen, since The Alto Knights is continuously limited by its insistence on ripping off one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived: Martin Scorsese. 

Saying that The Alto Knights is “The Irishman if you order it off Temu” may be the aptest descriptor of this profoundly dull and uninteresting drama, but it’s also the easiest way to dismiss a movie that, truth be told, should’ve been a home run. Levinson previously directed the incredible Bugsy and has collaborated with De Niro on several occasions, including Sleepers, Wag the Dog, What Just Happened, and The Wizard of Lies. The latter probably contains his best performance of any Levinson collaboration to date, and there was a real chance that his dual turn as both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese would rival his previous partnership with the filmmaker. 

Who shouldn’t be excited for a movie where De Niro plays not one but two ruthless mobsters? Two for the price of one – an offer no ardent cinephile who grew up with the veteran actor can refuse! While not reaching the heights of his portrayal of Bernie Madoff, De Niro is the only reason we are compelled to watch The Alto Knights to the end. Perhaps the overuse of prosthetics to distinguish the two mobsters is a tad distracting. Still, the 81-year-old actor infuses both characters with the exact authenticity and gravitas he brought to his best-ever dramatic performances. It may not be as layered or as complex as it is in a Scorsese film (most notably, through the use of silence as an emotional anchor for Frank Sheeran’s regrets in The Irishman), but it still gets the job done. 

Levinson and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi also attempt to humanize both mobsters through their respective relationships with their wives, Bobbie Costello (Debra Messing) and Anna Genovese (Kathrine Narducci, who also played De Niro’s wife in The Irishman – this movie is not beating the “The Temu Irishman” allegations anytime soon). However, none of the characters add much to the proceedings. Narducci fares better than Messing only because she has more material to work with in complexifying Anna’s destructive marriage with Vito. Still, the character eventually disappears from the movie and is never mentioned again, not even in a passing sentence. On the other hand, Messing is woefully miscast and has nothing of interest to do or even say concerning Frank’s narrative arc. Maybe it was the point, but her emotional anchor is nonexistent and adds zero texture to our understanding of how the protagonist operates. 

De Niro and Narducci previously explored these narrative underpinnings concerning the mobster’s relationship with their family, with far more depth and complexity in The Irishman. But the story of The Alto Knights is so far removed from The Irishman, so why is it so insistent on wanting to recreate the same feeling one had when watching Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour crime epic? It’s one thing to have De Niro play two mobsters navigating through different eras, but it’s another to copy the exact same playbook from Scorsese’s movies without understanding why his approach to mob dramas differed from his contemporaries. There hasn’t been a single Scorsese knockoff released in the past, whether at the mainstream or independent level, that has worked (remember when critics put out the hit on the horrendous Gotti?) because any filmmaker can recreate an aesthetic and setting, but will never be able to replicate the initial personal touch brought upon by the director who pioneered the sensibilities they’re copying. 

That’s why, as talented a filmmaker as Levinson may be, imitating a storied auteur feels like the nail in the coffin before your movie even has a chance of doing something interesting. As soon as Alto Knights opens, the title font and voiceover narration desperately want our mind to be primed that, hey, this is a Scorsese film, or at the very least, a mob drama treated in the tradition of Martin Scorsese. 

But what does “the tradition” of Scorsese mean for Levinson? All of his greatest hits (voiceover narration from a present-day scene where the older Costello recounts his past, talking directly to the camera at an invisible interlocutor, drawn-out tracking shots, needle-drops, a fraternity formed within the mob families, unstable marriages, etc), without the artistry behind them? Because all The Alto Knights accomplishes is a reheated grab-bag of Scorsese’s tropes, badly stitched together in the editing room to resemble a shell of a movie with enough callbacks to trick the average moviegoer into thinking Scorsese made it, but without his verve to entirely fool them. 

Levinson has been releasing consistently great work (though his last few movies haven’t been his best), and De Niro is still one of the best actors to have ever graced the silver screen. The recipe for an entertaining throwback to old school Hollywood gangster epics that’s decidedly Levinson’s, and not Scorsese, was there. So what happened? The answer is crystal clear when one discovers that The Alto Knights is a long-cherished passion project for Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, the man whose anti-art decisions have basically run the studio’s reputation into the ground (side note: for a passion project, why aren’t they marketing the hell out of it?). That explains why the images feel so listless; Levinson might have not been allowed to infuse his own personality, which he brought so well to his 1991 drama, Bugsy. If you want to make a Scorsese mob flick, you get the man himself, because there’s only one person who can accomplish what he did, and it’s not going to be Barry Levinson. 

Strangely enough, when The Alto Knights attempts to move away from the Scorsese hallmarks, such as in its thrilling, impeccably cut climax, the movie finds some juice to keep us invested. But these moments don’t happen as nearly enough as they should, resulting in a frequently jumbled movie that seemingly wants to find its own voice, but likely can’t, for fear of displeasing the man who wanted this film on the screens in the first place. It’s fine to pay tribute to one of the greatest-ever directors on occasion, but it’s not fine to base the entirety of a movie on aesthetic sensibilities no one, not even God, can replicate. De Niro’s performance is continuously engaging and often funny, and the editing work certainly gives a fast-paced rhythm to its story. However, they can’t overshadow the lingering ripoff scent that this film sadly perpetuates, ensuring The Alto Knights will have little-to-no perennity in Levinson’s – or De Niro’s – legendary, decades-long careers.

The Alto Knights will be released in theatres in the US and Canada, in UK & Irish cinemas, and globally in theaters on March 21, 2025.