The Untouchables

Brian De Palma, USA 1987, 119 mins

Gangster Al Capone (Robert De Niro) rules 1920s Chicago. The authorities are either too scared to act against Capone, or have been bought off by him. Enter Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner). The naïve federal agent is given responsibility for bringing Capone to justice. To do this Ness recruits a hand-picked team, all untouchable by corruption - a world-weary Irish cop (Sean Connery), a rookie straight out of police academy (Andy Garcia) and a mild-mannered accountant (Charles Martin Smith).

The team attacks Capone's bootlegging operations, trying to disrupt his supply and distribution network. But it's the accountant who finally provides the means to bring down Capone - it seems that his tax returns and his lavish lifestyle just do not add up.

While a perfectly entertaining example of Hollywood product, The Untouchables is perhaps a touch disappointing when you consider the talent involved. Director Brian De Palma does manage some memorable incidents and isolated fragments of brilliance - the most notable being that famous Battleship Potemkin inspired shoot-out on the train station steps. But he rarely manages to pull everything together satisfactorily or escape from cliché and formula. De Niro grandstands horribly as Capone and his performance jars badly with the more restrained approaches of Costner and co. The screenplay from David Mamet is also curiously anonymous, with only a few flashes of what you might expect from the writer of classics such as House of Games and Glengarry Glen Ross.

Other than this, though, The Untouchables is fine. The look and feel of the film, in terms of production design, cinematography and costumes (done by Armani) gives everything the right ambience. Connery deserved the best supporting actor Oscar he won, while Costner and Garcia gave their careers a sizeable boost. Overall, then, The Untouchables is solid entertainment. It's just not as good as you could imagine it being.

Keith H. Brown
EUFS Programme 1998-99

Kevin Costner is good guy Eliot Ness of the special police department, "The Untouchables" assigned to counter the activities of black marketeers in prohibition struck Chicago. His particular target is inhuman mobster Al Capone; a ferocious cameo from Robert de Niro. The acting is one of the main attractions, great work by supports like Andy Garcia and Charles Martin Smith is crowned by Sean Cannery's wonderful 'loveable rogue' performance as Malone, a streetwise beat cop under whose tutelage the saintly Eliot Ness learns that the only way to beat a crook like Capone is to fight him by his own dirty rules.

The story isn't particularly original, but works like a dream, rumbling along uniterrupted by De Palma's love of the cinematically spectacular until the set piece - Grand Central station. Borrowing from the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's much plundered Battleship Potemkin, De Palma constructs a wonderfully taut shootout, juggling his camera angles with enormous aplomb and justifying his reputation as one of American cinema's premier stylists.

The Untouchables doesn't have anything serious to say, but that doesn't matter; it's exciting, entertaining and enormously enjoyable.

Review by Iain Harral
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95