Two made men enter a bar (well, an upmarket restaurant) and, by golly, what a fine ultraviolent mess they get themselves into. You’ve seen this set-up a thousand times before, but Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights is intent on regurgitating such tried-and-tested bada-bing slop in all its ‘this’ll seem better if you watch it drunk on Netflix’ glory. The USP is that Robert De Niro plays both leads, one a mob boss-turned-professional businessman, the other a Joe Pesci tribute act with an ‘I’m here to amuse you?’ flair for kicking civilians’ heads in at high velocity. No matter the character, De Niro’s face is swaddled in enough prosthetics to resemble a government ad warning against back-alley nose jobs (more an incised guy than a wise guy, eh?. . I’ll get my Members Only jacket). 

The Alto Knights has been in development hell since 1974, so it’s no surprise that the premise has been laundered into cliché via Goodfellas and its pale imitators. That it should be reclaimed from the bins round the back of the Warner Bros studio lot points to a risk-averse era in the film industry, one where blowing a capo’s head off in a whirlwind of gore has grown quaint, and the naturalistic mumble of De Niro has become as cosy to moviegoers as John Wayne’s racist stride through Monument Valley. 

Thing is, Martin Scorsese already placed a full stop on the gangster movie with The Irishman. Much like the elegiac era of the western, this three-hour tome was an acknowledgement that its stars had grown long in the tooth as Scorsese whipped out a Now! That’s What I Call Racketeering greatest hits compilation and called time on a style that had earned a victory lap. Then galumphs The Alto Knights with a Goodfellas-cribbed hyper-reality and a capitalist critique that seems as far removed from the modern day as Karl Marx was from the 1970s. Through its hoary lens (as in The Godfather, Goodfellas and The Sopranos), the protagonists act as a demonic reflection of the American empire, realising their talents for extortion and abuse are assets in a business world hiding exploitation behind a veneer of respectability. 

We now live in a world run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk; the gangster film is irrelevant when capitalism openly feasts on the flesh of its adherents. The closest we’ve got to an equivalent modern comment is The Curse, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s offbeat dark comedy about a wealthy couple gentrifying a small, racially diverse town for their own gain. While they evict people from their homes, ignore poverty on their doorstep and fashion themselves into the perfect pair on reality television, a two-pronged strategy of algorithm-induced cultural myopia and self-absorption allows them to maintain a delusion that they’re decent, upstanding citizens. These are the new capo dei capi that The Alto Knights can’t fathom, each one of us participating in an ideological project which, as the gulf between rich and poor widens, has grown unashamed of avarice.