Sometimes an inept gangster is just an inept gangster, and there's little else you can say about that.

adrianionescu

"Citizen Gangster" is a low budget movie about a WWII Canadian soldier who felt so alienated in the humdrum of peace-time Toronto, that he started robbing banks for a living, around the year 1949. It's a story in the vein of "Public Enemies", Goddard's "Breathless", "Bonnie and Clyde", you name it, as you've seen it countless times: the "loveable" gangster, who fights not only society's rules, but also the conformity of being a square jawed bully with a gun.

This one, Eddie Alonzo Boyd (Scott Speedman, "Milk"), married with two children, secretly leaves his bus driving day job, and takes his war-time Luger to a personal war against poverty (and... boredom?). He disguises himself with sinister make-up reminding us of The Joker, which thus becomes his signature look; he jumps graciously over bank counters right into the lap of young female tellers, asking them politely, and at gun point, to "fill the bag".

His family life is destroyed after his secret is revealed, and a nondescript police detective manages to botch one of his downtown hits and cuff him. But Boyd breaks out of jail with a couple of acolytes (among which another WWII veteran, with a wooden leg), and gets back to being the "dazzling" bank robber young Canadian women have come to be fond of.

The film tries to give some meaning to the conflicted love between Boyd and his all-too devoted wife (Kelly Reilly, "Sherlock Holmes"), then it attempts to sprinkle glitz over the "wild" lifestyle of the outlaws (where everybody parties in a sordid building), and finally strikes a tragic chord with the re-capturing of Eddie Boyd and his men in the middle of a snowy field outside Toronto.

This movie is also the story of a young Canadian director (Nathan Morlando) who struggles with poor resources, fails to be inventive enough in his use of clichés (nods to predecessors are OK, as long as they're a means to an end), and reaches the finish line of his first feature film exhausted, and with a feeling of emptiness. The characters are choppy, the love story a bit drab, and the only thing that seems accomplished is the film's overall sense of pace.

When the only things you have are a few interiors and a bunch of moderately good actors, I guess the way to go around a story like that is to build characters accurately, develop relationships meaningfully, and weave creative dialogue in the framework of a conventional plot: none of which happened in "Citizen Gangster".

score 5/10

adrianionescu 13 May 2012

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2611090/