You could call this latest vehicle to propel Slater’s career as a baby girl heart throb Young Machine Guns if you like, but don’t compare it to The Godfather trilogy, Once Upon a Time in America, or Miller’s Crossing. Certainly, this slick but cheap trick from director Karbelnikoff has aspirations in that direction but in the end it’s facile. It tells us how a bunch of mobsters and killers came to be corporate businessmen when these days what we need to know is the other way around. Mobsters is a very sympathetic telling of the story of Lucky Luciano as played by Slater and his best friend Meyer Lansky (Dempsey), who take over Chicago after getting the old war lords to knock each other off. There are interesting angles in the fact that at least part of Luciano’s success was due to his ability to team up with Jewish gangsters and turn the prejudices of the old Dons against themselves. F. Murray Abraham plays a benevolent Arnold Rothstein while Quinn hams it up as the obese Ferragamo and some other guy snorts and snears as his opponent something or other. So far so good, but things go to hell when Nicholas Sadler shows up as Mad Dog Coll and starts doing everyone’s dirty work. Suddenly the violence becomes horrific and it’s a jolt. It’s hard to tell whether this stuff is coming from guilt because the filmmakers may have felt they were too sympatheic to the gangsters or from pure thrill seeking. I can’t help but suspect the latter and it does damage even though Sadler is pretty marvelous as a jittery psychopath who loves his work. The blood may flow freely through this movie, but no one’s career is going to be hurt by this mindless, vaguely entertaining, and thoroughly twisted history lesson. Slater has already proven he doesn’t have to make good movies to be popular, and this one is slightly better than his usual mediocre fare.
This article appears in August 2 • 1991 (Cover).