Gangster Squad ***

Set in late 1940s LA and apparently “inspired by a true story”, Gangster Squad is about an undercover team of police officers conducting an off-the-record operation to take down crime overlord Mickey Cohen. Josh Brolin plays straight-arrow Sergeant O’Mara, assigned the job of assembling a group of cops daring enough to take on Cohen - played in scenery chewing fashion by Sean Penn.

Crime literature at its best has substance; whether it’s in thematic ideas such as deception and moral duplicity, corruption in police departments or within Raymond Chandler’s introspective and alienated protagonist Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep .The tough, often convoluted ambiguity of the crime genre can be enticing. The problem with Gangster Squad is that it doesn't resemble either a generic thriller or a crime drama because there is no real suspense or substance.  It is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty efficient beating-up-the-bad-guys movie. There is something slickly enjoyable and totally empty about Ruben Fleischer’s ostentatiously designed picture which shares far more with Ocean’s Eleven than it does with L.A. Confidential.

Within the pulchritude of its glistening all-star cast and the intervals of explosive violence – which are someway between a live-action Tom & Jerry and Itchy & Scratchy – Giovanni Ribisi’s character hints speciously at a possible subtext; ‘can you remind me of the difference between us and them? Because at this point I can’t tell anymore…’ I believed Gangster Squad when it was a daft, flashy action movie – less so when it was pretending to have anything below its shimmering surface.