Goat

This movie could have been so much better. It had a decent cast and a good(not great) storyline. It was terribly over acted. Everyone was trying to be so dramatic in a film that was better suited to be an action film. The problem was , there wasn't any action. So a runtime of just under 2hrs felt like 4hrs. It dragged along complicated storylines that overlapped flashbacks & flashfowards. Unsatisfactory ending after a long buildup. It had just enough to keep you from turning it off. But not worth a rewatch.

This film is too ambitious for its own good. There are so many story lines and the film moves in-and-out of them with no apparent rationale. Less would be more. The acting is uniformly good and the film manages to have a "mean streets" feel to it. Any two or three of the story lines (criminal faced with choice, betrayal of friend, family discord, girl tries to make it, family fights mob influences, getting ahead in the mob) would have made this a good film, but all of them is just too much.

Having grown up in Bensonhurst Brooklyn during the 1960s, sad to say that the characters are true to life. This is one of the few movies that captures the argumentative and violence-prone nature of that neighborhood at that time. Goodfellas is another that captured that horrible milieu.

As a youth, every disagreement among the goombahs on my block led to threatened violence, typically settled by the oldest goombah, who was also the toughest fighter. When I reached the conclusion that I was smarter then my "friends" and stopped hanging with them, eventually they sent another tough guy from up the block to beat me up. (It was a stand-off, ended when an older neighbor intervened.)

The mob keeps order by threatened or actual violence, including murder. I know of a guy from the neighborhood who served years in prison for not ratting out the source of drugs he inadvertently sold to a DEA agent. When he was released from prison, he started drinking heavily. One night he walked out of a bar at 2 am and saw a mob boss's son murder someone on the street. Shortly thereafter this guy was kidnapped, shot through the eyes and dumped in the trunk of a stolen car. So don't claim this movie is too meoodramatic or over-acted; it isn't.

And I would be remiss not to mention Joe Colombo, boss of the Colombo "famiily" and one of the founders of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, an organization founded to deny the existence of the Cosa Nostra aka Mafia. On June 28, 1971, Colombo was shot three times in the head and neck by Jerome A. Johnson, with one of the bullets hitting him in the head, at the second Italian Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle sponsored by the Italian-American Civil Rights League. Was that too melodramatic or over-acted? It actually happened.

I had seen this title a few times and finally figured I'd give it a try. I mean after all it's a movie about Brooklyn and Ice T is in it. I couldn't get through more than a few minutes before turning it off & throwing it away. So if you're looking for a review on the story, I didn't see it. But for what I did see, it looked bad.

This movie was excellent. It had not only intense scenes with tough guys but also some hardships among friends as well as a little romance. It showed a lot about the main characters relationship with his father and also the pressures of coming home from jail and trying to acclamate into the real world. Demeo's performance in this film is truly exceptional.