Robert De Niro Plays Dual Roles In This Muted Mob Drama

In 1995, Michael Mann’s “Heat” gave cinephiles a face-off for the ages: at long last, legendary actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino would share the screen in an epic crime thriller. Now, in 2025, we have a new crime thriller that has Robert De Niro coming face-to-face with … Robert De Niro. This isn’t such a bad idea: despite a string of questionable roles in the latter half of his long, acclaimed career, De Niro remains one of our finest actors, and he’s turned in some recent performances — specifically his work in two Martin Scorsese movies, “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” — that prove he’s still got it.

With Barry Levinson’s “The Alto Knights,” De Niro pulls double duty, playing two real-life gangsters who grew up as friends before becoming bitter enemies. There’s a lot of room for potential mob movie fun here, and yet, Levinson’s film is so lifeless that it can’t rise to the occasion. De Niro, who gets buried in unconvincing makeup that makes him look like a ghoulish villain from Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy,” tries his best to make something of his dual roles, but the approach of having him play two different characters never rises above being little more than a gimmick. What could’ve been an interesting experiment ends up feeling distracting.

Movies about the mafia and gangsters have been with us since the dawn of film, and one common criticism against these pieces of pop entertainment is that they glorify the criminal lifestyle (this is a frequent charge lobbed at several of of Scorsese’s movies that also happen to feature De Niro). So I’ll say one thing about “The Alto Knights”: here is a mob movie that makes mob life look absolutely boring. There’s no glorification here — instead, there are numerous scenes where one of De Niro’s characters just hangs out in his living room watching TV instead of picking up a gun. According to “The Alto Knights,” being in the mafia is about as exciting as a lazy Sunday afternoon.

As “The Alto Knights” begins, it’s 1957, and Frank Costello (De Niro) is shot by a gunman in the lobby of his apartment building. Frank survives with only minor injuries, and he immediately knows who ordered the attempted hit: his old buddy Vito Genovese (also De Niro). Through flashbacks accompanied by narration provided by Frank, we learn that Frank and Vito came up in the mob together. Vito eventually rose up in the ranks to become a boss, but eventually had to flee to Italy to beat a murder wrap. Before Vito departed, he left Frank in charge.

Years after living in exile, Vito returns and wants his empire back. Frank urges caution and patience, and thus a rift begins to form between these two former friends. The men are complete opposites: Frank is a quiet, boring sort of guy who goes about his criminal activities anonymously — as anyone who knows their mob history can tell you, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover spent years claiming the mafia didn’t even exist, which enabled the organization to operate mostly in the shadows. To the outside world, Frank is simply a businessman and “professional gambler.”

Vito, in sharp contrast, is a thuggish hothead. He’s flashy and violent, prone to knifing people to death without hesitation. Vito himself even recognizes the differences between the two men: he says Frank is the “reasonable” one of the pair. The stark differences between the two characters gives De Niro plenty to work with: he plays Frank as quiet, almost sleepy, and portrays Vito as vulgar and ill-tempered (he also raises the pitch of his voice when playing Vito to better distinguish the two men).

As a longtime fan of De NiroI’ll admit I was hoping for some sort of acting magic here. As I said above, I think De Niro still has the goods — when he’s working with the right material. Sadly, “The Alto Knights” is not the right material, even though it has some talented people working in front of and behind the camera. In addition to De Niro, a chunk of the cast members from “The Sopranos” show up, while the film’s script hails from Nicholas Pileggi, the crime writer who penned the book that inspired “GoodFellas.”

Perhaps the weak spot is Levinson. The filmmaker has dabbled in the mob movie genre before — he helmed the memorable “Bugsy” — but Levinson is too reserved, too muted for this sort of stuff. It may be far too obvious a choice, but you can’t help but think that if Scorsese had reunited with Pileggi and De Niro for this movie, it might’ve been something special.

And while De Niro tries his best, the stunt double casting is consistently distracting. Despite their personality differences, there’s never one moment where we buy that these are two different guys. Facial makeup and voice changing aside, it’s always obvious that we’re watching De Niro sitting in a restaurant booth with De Niro.

There are occasionally glimpses of something more interesting scattered throughout “The Alto Knights.” At one point, Vito begins romancing Anna (Kathrine Narducci), a woman who operates a lesbian nightclub. The two get married, and Vito soon begins stealing money from Anna’s club, and she takes him to court — spilling a wealth of info about the mafia in the process. In truth, I’d rather watch an entire movie about that: the lesbian nightclub owner who outed the mafia in divorce court. That sounds like the type of interesting story that’s never been told on screen before. And yet, “The Alto Knights” relegates this as a quick, amusing anecdote that’s almost immediately forgotten in order to get back to the bad blood between Frank and Vito.

There’s also a throwaway line where Vito implies that he and Frank started to grow apart once Frank got married to his wife Bobbie (Debra Messing). Indeed, the movie makes a fequent point of showing us that Frank would rather hang out in his living room watching TV with his wife and two dogs instead of spending time at the club with the boys. Romance coming between the bromance of two mafia kingpins also sounds like a neat idea for a movie, but again, “The Alto Knights” treats this info as brief, casual background fodder and then moves on.

I suppose there’s something comfy and cozy about “The Alto Knights” — it’s the type of sleepy dad movie that can easily be watched from a worn-in armchair through half-closed eyelids on a rainy afternoon. The type of movie your father naps through and then says “It was okay” after you ask him how it was. In other words, there’s nothing offensively bad about “The Alto Knights” … but you kind of wish there was, because at least that might’ve made the movie more interesting.

/Film Rating: 5 out of 10

“The Alto Knights” opens in theaters on March 21, 2025.