Review: Goodfellas

3/4

What a colossal disappointment. If I had to rate this movie based on its value in the modern day, I would give it a 2. It's not funny, not dramatic, not a good plot... It has nothing The Departed has. It's just Memoirs of a Gangster--an average, everyday gangster. After The Godfather I thought I was interested in the mob. This was so uninteresting. I was so bored. It's light-hearted, shallow, speaks nothing about anything, and is boring.
However, if I had to rate it based on its influence upon release, it would be a 3.5. It has incredible realism, and Martin Scorsese captured the life of a wiseguy so well. It was probably one of the first realistic exposures the public had to modern-day gangsterism, so I can see why it's influential. But Roger Ebert said "best mob movie ever". No way.
My advice: watch The Departed. Be entertained.

This is unbelievable. The acclaim this film got. Ebert actually explicitly claimed it to be better than Godfather. A list called it the greatest movie ever. Am I missing something, or is it just the worst-aging movie of all time?? I'm not predisposed to boredom--I watched three-and-a-half hours of Godfather and could have kept going. I was done with Goodfellas after an hour. I'm never bored in movies. So I conclude that I am less sensitive to gangster films than people were in 1990. It is dated. And critics haven't woken up from their high. If they were to watch it for the first time today, as I did, they would realize.