Rob the Mob
Studio: Millennium Entertainment
Directed by Raymond De Felitta
Mar 19, 2014
Web Exclusive
In 1992, a young Queens couple—Thomas (Michael Pitt) and Rosemarie Uva (Nina Arianda)—held up a handful of mafia social clubs in the midst of the John Gotti trials, and came away with hundreds of thousands of dollars. To an extent, their plan was ingenious: the police wouldn’t care about a pair of hoodlums stealing from gangsters, and the proud mobsters would be too embarrassed by the situation to seek police cooperation. Queens’ modern-day “Bonnie and Clyde” got away with it—and even became celebrities in the city tabloids—until they came away from a knockover job with an item too valuable to both the FBI and New York’s crime families.
Rob the Mob is based on one of those stories which seems too cinematic to be true, but somehow is. The screenplay is clever, mining many moments for some excellent deadpan humor. Director De Felitta’s attention to period detail is great, making scenes shot in recognizable, modern-day Queens locations look convincingly early ‘90s. The film’s best elements, though, are the performances: Pitt makes the audience feel for his boneheaded but well-meaning criminal, and Arianda (in her first leading role) is outstanding as his brassy girlfriend. The rest of the cast is well-selected, with a strong, serious turn from Ray Romano, who plays a newspaper reporter covering the organized crime beat, and Andy Garcia, whose portrayal of a hardened mob boss is one of the more sympathetic ones you’ll see in a modern film. While it’s no Godfather or Goodfellas—though, you probably wouldn’t expect that from a film with such a silly title—it’s by far one of the most fun mob thrillers we’ve seen in some time.
Author rating: 7.5/10
Average reader rating: 10/10
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July 24th 2017
12:56pm
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