The Playlist:
Manifest Destiny lies beside its essential hubris in the period actioner “Gangster Squad,” but beyond the swaggering idealism seen through eponymous hoodlum Mickey Cohen (played by Sean Penn), the film's saturated grab bag of glossy homage proves its final shortcoming. With his third feature, “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer frames 1940s Los Angeles -- morally compromised, glamorous, and a monument to protect and exploit on both sides of the law -- to adapt Paul Lieberman's true-crime articles into cinematic legend, but in lieu of any sharp insight into the period and its notorious figures, the film's brash, ultraviolent encounters instead build a showy exterior with nothing of import left standing. (Cinema, The Gangster Squad) D/A