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Chicago, 1922: Jack McGurn's (Sean Faris) a good kid, he wants nothing more than to become a prize fighter, so much so that he has changed his Italian name to an Irish one as Irish boxers are more likely to be accepted by the audience. He's such a good kid that he turns down the offer of a gangster to enter the bootlegging business - that gangster being Al Capone (Milo Gibson). Sure, technically his father is also in the booze trade, making his own wine despite the prohibition - but basically poppa's just a grocer who sells the wine under the counter to make a couple of bucks on the side ... which is too much for Bugs Moran's (Peter Facinelli) mob and thus Jack's dad is gunned down right in front of his shop. This, and the fact that the police does do nothing to solve the crime, being on Moran's payroll, turns Jack cynical, and consequently he turns to Al Capone and asks if the job offer's still good - and turns out it is. Jack's only condition is that Capone finds out for him who killed his father.

Jack proves to be a good soldier for Capone, and soon rises up in the ranks, up to his second-in-command. At the same time, the fight between Capone's and Moran's gangs gets more and more violent, to the point where Moran wants Jack out of the way and pays two goons to shoot holes into his body - which they do, but rather by a miracle, Jack survives ... and now he wants revenge on Moran and his men - which directly leads to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, where Jack's the instigator and lead gunman. But Moran escapes the bloodbath rather by accident. Thing is, this event finally turns the public opinion against the gangsters - who so far have mainly been the public's suppliers of alcohol - and the FBI takes over from local lawmen to take gangsterdom down one man at a time. Which is pretty much the beginning of Al Capone's (and consequently also Jack's) downfall ...

True, Gangster Land doesn't re-invent the wheel, and it hardly lives up to Martin Scorsese's gangster epics in quality - but at the same time it does remarkably well for a low budget gangster flick, taking cues from genre films from decades ago and telling its complex story in a very compelling way that ticks off all the right boxes and gives the audience what it expects in tension, action and violence rather than trying to reinterpret things in a post-modernist way.

Basically it's a cool period gangster flick that doesn't try to be more than it is but delivers on its promise!

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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