The God Father Part III (#)

Sometimes you just don’t know when to stop, I guess. This is the feel I’ve always gotten form the Godfather Part III. To be honest, I was only familiar with the first movie and just recently saw the Sequel, a fantastic sequel by the way.

The one thing that this movie has related to it’s predecessors is the length. Three hours! Three hours of my life I have to give to this movie. For this reason it took me so long to watch the film. This and the fact that everyone says it’s bad. I don’t mind sitting through a bad movie, but it gets harder when you pile on the minutes. I wish someone had told Coppola your movie stinks you should cut out half (That sooo would have worked)

Francis Ford Coppola made the third movie just like he made the others, literally. Each movie starts out at some sort of family get together, and at this get together the Godfather takes request among the people who have come. I will say that the request from this particular group of people in the third flick is weak. Michael Corleone’s son wants to quit Law school to become a singer, and the Don is like no!. Then some cousin in the family (played by Andy Garcia) wants to be a hit man or something and make good use out of him being an over aggressive punk, which is not something the Don wants in his hit man.

Then after the party that’s basically used to introduce all the main characters, the real story begins with Corleone’s attempt to go legit (sort of) and the other families want in on the legit profits but if that happens, they would not really be legit.

I am going into this with a low value of what I’m about to watch but in fairness the Godfather part three does nothing to make that value increase. My assumption is that the third installment may have come to far after the second, making it something nobody wanted to see at the time, especially. It’s not a coincidence that Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas would come out around the same time and reboot the public perception of the Mafia.

All the Godfather movies are a very slow ride into the life of the Corleone family, and somehow with the first movie and the second, Coppola was able to keep it interesting. The Godfather was a slow burn filled with fantastic imagery and well done acting and The Godfather part II was such a natural continuation of what the first movie was, it’s no wonder it’s considered one of the greatest sequels of all time.

The biggest problem I see with the Godfather part Three is that the Characters are not as interesting to me as in the other movies. Not just Sophia Coppola, who everyone keeps gravitating towards as being the weak point in the movie. I mean, I get the impression that she is a bad actor and I say this freely because she has done an amazing job following in her father’s footsteps behind the camera. She’s nice to look at, even though she’s not the most traditional archetype of beauty, but whenever I stare at her cuteness, I can see the dead-ness in her performance.

If anything, Sophia Coppola is actually just the best example of what’s wrong in the movie. Too be quite honest, Andy Gracia is not exactly pulling me into the world of the Corleone’s either. After what I said about Sophia, it’s interesting that there are barely any scenes in the movie were the camera is directly looking at Gracia’s face, making it harder to see the dead-ness in it.

You know who’s really struggling (more than Al Pacino leading this weak cast) is Joe Mantegna. Every time I see his character on the screen, all I keep thinking is that this dude is in the wrong line of work. It makes sense that he does not look like a mafia head. The idea that he inherited his seat is written all over his face, and his character acts as a good polar opposite to Micheal Corleone, who was able to sustain what his father left him from the original movie, but Mantegna is not given me anything. He’s like a book you put under the table so that your oranges don’t roll off it. It works. but it makes the table look cheap.

But I knew something was wrong with the cast the moment I saw George Hamilton as the family lawyer. More than Sophia, Hamilton was the pin point that told you this cast sucks.

Oh, Well. It’s not the first time or the last time that the third movie in the trilogy weaken the trilogy. Somehow Coppola was doing the exact same thing he did with the first two movies but lighting only strikes twice in this case. For me it’s amazing that the long and slow paced narrative of all three was able to work the first two times, but there was a magic in the cast and in the time that it was made that did not follow into the 90s.