The Godfather Part III

I watched history's most infamous threequel earlier tonight with high hopes. My logic was that the first two movies hadn't lived up to their hype for me, so this underhyped one could easily surprise me. In a way, it did. To recap, I enjoyed the first Godfather movie very much, but wouldn't quite consider it the greatest film of all time. The second one is a film I was far less impressed by. Halfway through this movie, I was definitely thinking, wow, this movie has a chance to legitimately rank higher than the second one (in my book, at least) when all is said and done. Ultimately though, it fell a bit short. The ending - one that was certainly supposed to be climactic - was an odd mixture of half "knock-off of the first film's ending" and half "totally expected and foreshadowed tragedy." I didn't find Andy Garcia particularly bad - in fact, I enjoyed him. I also liked Al Pacino far more in this movie than I did in the second one. And that's weird, because his Godfather II Michael Corleone is praised around the world as one of the greatest performances of all time. Perhaps it was just the character itself that I liked more this time around. The second movie's machismo-laden and angry crime boss was now a shell of his former self: aging, ailing, and above all, remorseful for the many sins of his past. The moment it became clear to me that this movie was ranked far below the other two for a reason was when on-screen cousins Garcia and Sofia Coppola built up a ton of sexual tension in a kitchen and broke it by passionately making out. And no one seemed upset with this! In a culture and family where honor seemed to mean everything, nobody - not even the father of the girl, Don Corleone himself - was outraged. First cousins! The Don's beloved daughter and his heir apparent were doing the horizontal mambo and the Don's only concern was that the pairing would make his daughter a marked woman. Jesus! And that wasn't the only way Sofia Coppola contributed to ruining the movie. Her acting was, honest to God, some of the worst I've ever seen on screen. She was cute enough for the most part, but she was just a terrible, terrible actress. Francis Ford (the director and her daddy) takes a lot of shit for casting her in the role, but that was a move that came after Julia Roberts and Winona Ryder both dropped out of the role. Sofia was likely nothing more than a hesitant fill-in and I'm sure neither father nor daughter wanted her in that role. At least I hope that's the case. Because, wow, she was just a horrible actor. So yeah. The movie wasn't the awful pile of shit that some people would want you to believe it is, but it sure did fail to live up to the first two.