Martin Scorsese walks this Earth just like the rest of us, except he sees the angles of life that most of us ignore — angles that include Irish hitmen, sociopathic taxi drivers, Italian mob influence, and the best locations to hide a body. His new passion project, The Irishman, appears to be his Mona Lisa-masterpiece of a film, combining everything we love about his previous classics with the history of several unsolved American mysteries like, what really happened to Jimmy Hoffa? Did the Italian mob have something to do with JFK’s assassination? Where’s Joe Pesci been for the last 20 years? When The Irishman unpacks its incredible characters, tremendous (based on a true) story, and a cast that includes Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro, there’s no doubt it’ll top the list of Scorsese’s classics. Here are six reasons why The Irishman will be everything we’ve ever wanted from a Scorsese mob movie. Enjoy!
Cover Photo: Netflix
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Scorsese Irishman
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It's Al Pacino's first Scorsese movie.
The Academy Award-winning actor has played some of the most iconic roles in the history of badass films. The list is incredibly long and distinguished, including multiple classics like The Godfather films, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Scent of a Woman, Dick Tracy, Glengarry Glen Ross, Scarface, and Heat. It's an absolute bonfire of incredible films with very few misses over a career spanning half a century. But somehow Pacino has never worked with Scorsese on a feature. This is the Mount Everest of collaborations.
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Joe Pesci came out of retirement for this film.
After his spectacular run in the '90s as everyone's favorite Napoleon-complexed actor, Pesci surprisingly called it quits, much like his most underrated character study from Home Alone, Marv. Pesci disappeared from our lives without even a wink and a grin. At the tender age of 50, Pesci was ready to spend time with family, work on his golf game, and enjoy the spoils of the type of success only a high-ranking member of the Gambino family could appreciate. It's extremely rare that an actor at his level takes a self-imposed break during the height of his career, a break that lasted almost 20 years (minus two random films in 2006 and 2010). But finally Pesci is back. The real question is: how many, and with what tactics, will Pesci's character in The Irishman bluntly (or with a fountain pen) execute the mob's agenda?
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'The Irishman' ties together the Italian mafia, Jimmy Hoffa, and JFK's assassination.
The Irishman weaves together a tapestry of plotlines based on a real person, Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, who on his deathbed confessed to murdering Jimmy Hoffa for the Bufalino crime family and that he had intimate knowledge of the JFK assassination. Is there anything more over-researched, more historically intriguing, and more insanely mysterious than those three topics? They're the holy trinity of American history in film with more weight than a cannoli, a gun, and Pete Clemenza. Let the conspiracy theories explode.
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Robert De Niro is an Irish hitman again.
In the Scorsese mob classic, Goodfellas, De Niro played Jimmy "The Gent" Conway, another character based on a real-life Irish hitman used by the Italian mob. The Irishman has brought De Niro back to his roots as a straight-faced, no-nonsense killer who is an absolute master at "painting houses." It's proof once again that the mob always has the best code names for stuff.
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When Joe Pesci sits in an Italian restaurant, magic happens.
When Joe Pesci plays an Italian mob character in a Scorsese film and sits inside an Italian restaurant with red-ish lighting while glaring at other people in the scene, you know you've got a classic film on your hands. Pesci has an incredible ability to appear as though he's strategically plotting every character's death simultaneously by way of a fork, pen, or napkin -- whatever's closest.
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De Niro and Pacino will be in a scene together for only the second time ever.
De Niro and Pacino have only been in a three-fingered handful of movies together (which is unfathomable), and they've only had one actual scene together (of any real note) in Michael Mann's classic bank heist movie, Heat. Hopefully,The Irishman will bring us back to the moment every mob movie fan pines for, another stare-down between our generation's finest tough-guy actors. And this time it's Jimmy Hoffa versus Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran in an epic Scorsese passion project that has been in the works for over a decade!
