The production design is extraordinary. The costume design in extraordinary. The lensing is uniformly good. The sound is exceptionally good. The de-aging VFX did not bother me at all. With that out of the way...
An extraordinary length in a movie is like making an extraordinary claim in court. You better back it up with the goods. You better have good solid reasons and a story to back it up. I did not find that to be the case here. I found the film extremely tedious, boring in parts and I was yawning throughout (and I saw both Soah and Satantango in single sittings without any problem). The pacing here is completely off.
As is the muddled screenplay. What is this movie even built around structurally? The film literally takes about two hours to even get started. Everything before that mark seems like set-up and an interminable deluge of exposition.
I think it all begins with construction. Superficially, the movie is constructed around Frank Shreeran - the Irishman of the title - who in this telling, is a supremely uninteresting character. The character is a cipher, essentially a dumb henchman, mostly opaque and we have little access to his thoughts or state of mind. He's not sympathetic in the least at any point in the story and you wonder why are we even following him. I enjoy unsympathetic characters plenty but Sheeran, as good as De Niro is here, is really not even fascinating like I said - just dull. He is also kind of an unwitting narrator it would seem, a Watson figure in some way, a character who is narrating a story about far more interesting people. And the story that he narrates here is actually not about himself but about the fortunes of Hoffa and the circumstances around his disappearance. Hoffa is the reason this movie exists, Hoffa gives the movie an interesting character it can coalesce around and it takes interminably long to arrive at the good stuff.
The movie is also compiled in a bit of a muddled way. There are two frame narratives. Old senile Sheeran talking to the camera and the audience which is the first frame. Embedded in it is the second frame which is a road-trip with Sheerean and Bufalino to Detroit for a wedding. And embedded within this road-trip functioning as recollections is essentially a broad survey of Sheeran's life more or less chronologically to bring us to the conclusion of the road-trip. This structure is not readily apparent and any urgency or cohesion that it might have provided is lost over the extended run-time. Maybe it's a shortcoming of the editing.
The film isn't boring for lack of incident. Indeed, scene upon scene pile up - offering a broad compendium of events in US history, and mob violence and labor unions, but there is no inherent drama. You really wonder for the first 2 hours where is this all headed? What is the point? There is no momentum to the film. It repeatedly stalls in scenes. Even many if not most of the conversations seem to go on for too long. They arrive at the point after circuitously roving about. The entire enterprise seems to be suffused with lethargy even though the film-making itself is consistently good.
For me, the only point where I felt engrossed and where I felt that there was true drama on the screen and this embalmed movie came alive from its tomb (or mausoleum) was -
the extended sequence of Hoffa's assassination. Right from the first warning of it to the two days which chronicle the planning and execution of it.
I felt this 30 minute or so section was the meat of the story - one of the standout sequences of the year, amazingly directed, with extremely high stakes, full of suspense and dread and just all round superbly executed. This essentially represents the climax of the story - or even the reason why the book was written and the movie was made. And yet it takes about 2 hours before you get here and another 30 minutes after it.
There was no drama in Sheeran's life story because it was just a series of incidents. There didn't seem to be any conflict. Only in the sequence above is when the film can breathe and slow down and milk the extremely potent drama of the situation and have discernible human emotions involved.
I should also add that, adding to the tedium is the fact that - while the de-aging is inoffensive - none of the characters ever really look young. I think youngest De Niro looked was probably 45. So even though this was supposed to span decades, you don't see the variation or passage of time in the faces. Instead of fresh, boyish, young, middle-aged, old, older, decaying, you only see the last 3 or if we want to be charitable the last 4.
Be that as it may, the film overall is well done and it is hard to fault it on many fronts. The acting is exceptional throughout. Every player is in top form - I specially loved Pesci. Pacino is very good as well. But the film at least in my first viewing, did not grip me. I rarely if ever watch a film again, so I am reluctant to watch a movie again which I found boring and overlong the first time around. But I will see if time is kinder to the movie in my memory. I do think it is not a complete waste of time, but I think it falls far short of what it could have been and it most certainly could do with considerable editing and shortening.
For a far better gangster picture this year, I would point out Bellochio's
The Traitor. That is a film which you could think covers similar ground in that it talks about the hard stuff once the glory days are over. It also is far more poignant and compelling in portraying the end of a gangster's life. That film - also running 2 and a half hours, is tightly edited and controlled and has bravura sequence upon bravura sequence as it unravels the gangster culture through similar political turmoil and corruption in Italy. Not to mention the courtroom scenes are outstanding. For those looking for an alternative to Irishman, I would highly recommend The Traitor as a point of comparison.