Mean Streets

I feel terrible because I like Martin Scorsese’s work very much, but this one, alas, I did not. Maybe, and I’ll admit it, I just didn’t get it, but this movie was just not interesting or captivating. On the contrary, it was sort of boring.

The performances, as you would expect from the likes of Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel, were very good, but the story just dragged along from a lone starting point to a lone ending one, and not much stayed with me when the credits started rolling.

This is what I call a window-movie, meaning that watching it is like opening a window on a street section, only here we open it on someone’s life for a couple of hours and then close it. There isn’t always a starting point (with a clear reason), a development and a conclusion. Sometimes the whole reason for the movie is just to show you a certain moment in time.

This movie felt like that. It shows you a moment in the life of DeNiro’s character when he’s in some trouble with some shady characters from his neighborhood. You can tell from the beginning that the guy is messed up, so you don’t hold out much hope that he’ll have a bright future. And that is pretty much all I remember of the whole story.

Like I said, I generally like Scorses’s work and it’s nice to see one of the first efforts by DeNiro and Keitel, but this movie left me a little cold.

Grade: 5