The Untouchables (1987)

Let me tell you about a film that knows exactly what it wants to be and delivers it with enormous confidence, even if it never quite reaches the heights it's clearly aiming for. Brian De Palma's The Untouchables is a handsomely mounted, old-school gangster picture that wears its classic Hollywood influences proudly. Part western, part noir, all swagger. It's the kind of film they used to make before studios got frightened of big emotions and bold gestures, and there's something genuinely refreshing about that, even when it tips over into grandiosity.

De Palma directs with operatic flair, and the set pieces still thrill decades on. The Union Station shootout, clearly inspired by the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, is a masterwork of sustained suspense. Slow motion, ticking clocks, an impossible situation stretched to breaking point. It's the kind of filmmaking that reminds you why you love going to the pictures in the first place. De Palma's craftsmanship never falters, even when other elements around him do. And the period detail is impeccable. Chicago feels authentically grimy, smoky, and soaked in whiskey and corruption. The costumes, the cars, the Tommy guns, all of it transports you completely. You can practically smell the speakeasies.

Then there's Robert De Niro as Al Capone, and honestly, he's the film's crown jewel. He can't have more than ten minutes of screen time across the whole picture, but every second of it crackles. Munching a grape. Holding court in hotel lobbies. Monologuing about baseball bats with a chilling, almost playful casualness. De Niro makes Capone magnetic and terrifying in equal measure, and the film is at its most alive whenever he's on screen. You keep wishing it would find more excuses to cut back to him.

The rest of the acting is more uneven, and I'll be honest about that. Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness is earnest, sure, but he's stiff with it. A Boy Scout in a world of wolves. There's a certain woodenness to him that keeps you at arm's length when you should be fully invested. And Sean Connery's performance, which was so widely lauded at the time, I'm not entirely convinced by either. There's warmth there, and he's likeable enough, but some of the dialogue he's handed leans so hard into melodrama that it becomes difficult to take seriously. The script has a tendency to reach for mythic resonance and occasionally just lands on cheese instead.

What saves every scene regardless is Ennio Morricone's score. Soaring, brass-heavy, enormously confident, it's the kind of music that makes even a quiet conversation feel momentous. Morricone understood the film De Palma was trying to make, possibly better than anyone else involved.

I've always had a soft spot for De Palma's gangster work. I loved Scarface (1983) for its sheer unhinged excess, and later Carlito's Way (1993) for the way it wrung genuine tragedy out of similar material. The Untouchables sits somewhere between the two in terms of tone. It's too slick and too mythic to reach the raw power of either, but it's doing something different. It's a Hollywood legend, consciously constructed and polished to a high shine. It's not The Godfather, and it knows it isn't trying to be. It's aiming for the kind of rousing, crowd-pleasing genre picture that classic Hollywood did so brilliantly, and on those terms, it mostly succeeds.

The trouble is that flirting with greatness and actually achieving it are two different things. The Union Station sequence is great. De Niro is great. Morricone is great. The rest is very good, occasionally brilliant, but held back by uneven performances and a script that reaches for poetry and sometimes just finds rhetoric. It's a film I enjoy enormously in the moment and think about less once it's over. That's not a small thing, but it is a limitation.

Three and a half stars. Polished, propulsive, and well worth your time, just don't go in expecting it to stick around in your bones the way the very best gangster pictures do.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1987  | Watched: 2026-03-14

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Brian De Palma: Carrie (1976) · Scarface (1983) · Carlito's Way (1993)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More history: Apocalypto (2006) · Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury (2013) · Harakiri (1962) · Night and Fog (1956)