Vassago

This is an extremely fictionalized pseudo-adaptation of the events surrounding the well-known case of Reena Virk's death. In the hands of someone skilled and interested in telling a realistic and taut tale, that true tragic story could have become a powerful tale of teenage alienation and bad choices, a la the unmatched "River's Edge". Unfortunately, because nowadays it is more profitable to sell and market everything as a television series, this was stretched into six hours of some (very, very few) true elements of the case, mixed mostly with pointless filler, pointless flashbacks, pointless made-up soap-opera dramas of pointless made-up characters (while several far more interesting characters from the real case are completely omitted), and, of course, more "producer" credits than cast member names. If you want to know the case, read the articles; if you actually want to watch this, warn your fast-forward button in advance.

I first learned of Hale and the Osage murders as a little child in the 80s, when I read the story in Stanislaw Mierzenski's famous, encyclopaedic book "Gangsterzy". The grim, true tale of greed and blood has stayed with me since then, as did William Hale's name. Scorsese apparently learned of the story from a much newer book, and decided to adapt it - unfortunately, the result is an extremely long, bloated film, which is often dull and has rather little to tell, overall. It goes on for 3,5 staggering hours, which feel like 10 hours, yet its actual content would fit easily in a 1,5-hour film... with room for titles and end credits. Multiple scenes are shot, pointlessly, in exasperatingly elongated slow-motion, utterly unnecessary scenes fill out much of the film, details are repeated, and little happens for much of the feature. In fact, I suspect that the montage of photographs of various Osage victims in the first 30 minutes was added in post-production, because it stands out rather oddly - I would not be surprised if a producer yelled: "Marty, you HAVE to put that in, there's nothing else to jolt the audience in the entire first hour!".

It is rather close to the facts of the story, closer than many of Scorsese's previous, largely fictionalized adaptations of various true tales. That is the one strength of this film - although, unbelievably enough, it *omits* some of its more striking parts. For instance, the shocking tale of the advocate Vaughan is not included at all... but there certainly is a lot of slow-motion dancing.

Stanislaw Mierzenski had told the same story on barely 10 pages in his work "Gangsterzy" over 50 years ago - and he managed to contain more information (including Vaughan's demise) on those pages than the film does. Furthermore, his presentation was exciting and unforgettable. Scorsese's is not.

(On an unrelated note, I cannot even give the proper spelling of Stanislaw Mierzenski's name here, because, after only three decades of existing, IMDB still does not have Unicode support).