Like a high-gloss video game stretched to fit a feature-length canvas, Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad is heavy on the fireworks and light on the consequences, its association with real-life lowlifes and the white hats who want them cuffed more incidental than historical. Though racketeer-run 1949 Los Angeles is a gift-bowed setting for a director as visually minded as Fleischer (Zombieland), this tale of an off-the-books police force tasked with taking down snarling kingpin Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) is shaded more like Sin City than L.A. Confidential, with aesthetically perfect sets that lurch off the screen and a square-jawed, comic-book approach to good and evil. Built atop muscly noir dialogue as thick as the neckties worn by the single-minded shooters on both sides, it’s a triumph of style that’s short on substance. One of a few LAPD officers not intimidated or bribed by criminals, war hero Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) is secretly recruited by police chief Bill Parker (Nick Nolte) to piece together a band of can’t-be-bought brothers to get results however they can, no badges flashed. Recruiting a crew of skilled shooters (Robert Patrick, Michael Peña, Giovanni Ribisi, Anthony Mackie) that also includes his womanizing buddy Sgt. Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling, having fun with period haberdashery and noir accents), O’Mara begins ripping through L.A.’s underworld holdings with his squad, including Wooters’ work on Cohen’s best girl Grace (Emma Stone). There are fistfights and car chases and shootouts and wistful references to the ugliness of war galore as the team inches closer to toppling Cohen’s Left Coast empire, but the dynamic between the do-gooders always seems surface and flimsy. A hesitant undertone pervades both the players (Peña, misplaced; Stone, miscast) and the game. All the suits are impeccably pressed, but it’s tough to tell if any of the bodies inside are warm.
