The Godfather Part II (9 out of 1,001-The greatest sequel ever made?)

Possibly? Maybe? I’m not sure myself. All I know is that the there possibly is no sequel more critically acclaimed than the second Godfather film, and what makes that such an impressive feat is that the first movie was just as acclaimed.

It’s like with the Dark Knight. No one ever mentions Batman Begins, we all see it as a warm up to the greatest superhero movie ever made. The same goes for Terminator 2: Judgement Day. As good as The Terminator is, T2 was on a different level. Speaking of different level (and by no coincidence, of James Cameron), though I personally love Aliens more than Alien, they work as two different movies, Alien is an horror movie and Aliens is an action movie, both set in a shared universe. On the other side of this, of the original Star Wars Trilogy, Empire Strikes Back is a tour de force in comparison  to the other two, however, no matter how great the movie is by itself, it does not and is met not to stand alone.

So what makes Part II worthy of being a movie that needs to be seen before you die? I don’t know, do you have three hours and twenty two minutes to spare in your life? That is the running time of this film. It’s long as shit! Technically watching it in 2017 (For the very first time, which surprises me), it’s actually not that long, I’ve binged watched series in one sitting that were twice as long. Yet this is a movie not a series so I have to adjust my mind to this, get some food to keep my strength up, get some caffeine up in me maybe.

So Al Pacino is now the head of the Corleone family. The movie starts out with the origin of Vito Corleone which I was hoping would lead to Marlon Brando being in the movie (Maybe even James Caan). Like the first film the movie starts out at a huge family ceremony (I”ll mention here that the movie also ends in a similar fashion) In which Micheal Corleone decides to conduct business while the party goes on. Most of the business has to do with his power over some Vegas territory. It allows us to catch up on characters that survived the last movie and show us who the new players are.

So taking the place of Vito Corleone is Robert DeNiro, playing a younger version as he tells of the climb of Corleone to the top of the Food change intertwined with scenes of his son keeping the thrown. De Niro is actually quite good in this film with a performance that respects who originally played Don Corleone with out copying it. The best part was De Niro was speaking Italian for most of the flick (Wonder if he already knew it prior to filming?), and I will admit I did like the slow (very slow (sometimes it felt painfully Slow) burn of revenge DeNiro’s Corleone con to extract in the picture.

So, In my opinion, I have to say, in the guise of the thousand and one movies I must see before I die, I could have did something else with the Three hours and Twenty two minutes. The God father part II looks beautiful and has held up well in that beauty, but it’s too long for me. Micheal Corleone is not as interesting as Brando’s version of Vito Corleone and no where as interesting as Pacino’s other famous gangster role, Tony Montana in Scarface.

There was a lot of cool moments, like the fact that both Harry Dean Staton and the Stan Lee of B-movies,  Roger Croman make cameos in the same scene, but this is overshadow buy how long it is.

It’s So long it needs an intermission. That’s too long, but not as interesting a plot as say Grand Prix, which also has an intermission, but overall kept me coming back for more. Yeah, I could have lived without seeing this.