Imean the classics - Godfather I and II, Goodfellas, Casino, Once Upon a Time in America, Miller’s Crossing, Get Carter, and the first French Connection to name a few favourites.

There are also others, from France; Breathless, Leon, Rififi The Red Circle, Add Boiling Point from Japan and City of God from Brazil. If I’ve omitted any of your favourites, shoot me. What most of these films have, just like hundreds of others in the genre, are the classic elements which are required to drive and steer the narrative until it all comes crashing down in a hyper-stylish blaze of greed, betrayal, and blood-soaked glory.

A lot of gangster films depend on a rags-to-riches-to-rags narrative whereby the bad guys have to do a lot a of seriously nasty stuff to drag themselves up through the cesspit of organised crime, finally make it to the top or not too far from the summit, only to perish on the end of a meat hook or the thick end of a baseball bat. What’s intriguing about a lot of gangster films is that at some point, you actually find yourself rooting for the bad guys in spite of their penchant for casual violence, corruption, and their amoral rampage through life.

Come on, who didn’t feel slightly pissed off when Joe Pesci’s ‘Tommy’ got whacked by the made guys in Goodfellas? And didn’t you want to throw your arms around Robert de Niro’s ‘Jimmy’ as he cried his eyes out and wrecked a phone booth when he heard the news? All this in spite of them being psychotic, murdering nut-jobs who sat down for dinner with Tommy’s apple-pie mom while made guy Billy Batts was locked up and about to be executed in the boot of their car in the driveway.

Right now, there is a gangster movie being streamed into our houses every day. In classic fashion, it involves an amoral, narcissistic psychopath who has embarked on a monumental grift which even Martin Scorcese would struggle to get past the commissioning editors in Hollywood. Let’s call him “The Don”. This convicted felon has surrounded himself with arse kissing morons who will say and do anything to ensure that the boss remains untouchable as he stuffs every pocket he owns with billions of dollars gleaned from the very people he claims to represent. One of those morons, a thick-as-mince hillbilly by the name of JD, has his head so far up the boss’s ass that he could lick the fried chicken debris from his molars.

In classic gangster fashion, the boss loves to hang around with other psychos. On a recent trip to the middle east, he fixed a deal to supply $142 billion worth of weapons to a megalomaniac dictator who recently oversaw the murder and dismemberment of a journalist who was getting a little too close to uncovering and revealing mountainous levels of corruption and state-sanctioned violence in that particular neck of the woods.

The boss also took delivery of a $400 million “flying palace” from the head of another dictatorship whose track record includes a list of human rights violations too lengthy to go into detail here. A ban on political parties, abuse and exploitation of foreign migrant labour, arbitrary detention for dissent, and the subjugation of women should be enough to paint the picture.

The boss in this particular movie almost lives up to the rags-to-riches narrative. He inherited a lump of money from his racist father, invested it in real estate and then went bankrupt a few times. Although you wouldn’t know it as he has continued to grift his way through life seemingly unhindered by a complete lack of any intelligence or morality.

But this guy has always had access to money and a coterie of poisonous billionaires willing to put him up as their stooge so that they can avoid any form of regulation, transparency, and scrutiny. Show him the money and he will fix it. Spend absolute fortunes convincing millions of people that he is a decent guy who will have your back and therefore you should definitely trust him and legitimise his whole stinking operation by installing him as your president. Even though your back has a knife in it. 

Who could possibly root for this guy?

And the title of this particular movie?

It’s up there at the top of the column…