A Bronx Tale (1993)

Powerful

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A Bronx tale was not a bad film but it lacked strong substance or good writing to hold it together. It depicted life and tensions of growing up in a Mob run town full of different communities. However it never quite gets there. You can see De Niro is trying to emulate the iconic Goodfellas with the soundtrack and tale of a child growing under mob influence but the film is a mix of interesting and somewhat random events. It lacks a strong premise. De Niro has chosen the winning ingredients for his drink but is still unsure of what drink he is making,

This movie was a really good movie in my opinion. This movie was able to represent the constant feud between whites and black that still exist today. Additionally this movie illustrated how hard teenage romance is and how much effort that has to be put into it to make it work. One thing I think this movie could have worked was making the ending better. Another thing this movie did well was allowing its audience to be able to empathize with several of the characters and i think that a good thing because while watching the movie you tend to relate to the difficulties and experience of others.

(Originally reviewed:) 05/01/2017 Chazz Palminteri, Lillo Brancato, and Robert De Niro are superb in this underlooked, outstanding gangster drama, which shows De Niro in a different light as someone who does not want his son mixing with the mob. I admired the way they used the background, I admired the relationship between Brancato's character and the young African American girl, I also admired how the story unfolded rather unpredictably and how the picture ended. It was utterly satisfying and there's even a cameo from a real top actor, which I will not reveal. A Bronx Tale is a great film and one of the best films I've seen in a while.

The fascinating thing about this movie is that it cannot simply be classified as yet one another MAFIA gangster story. It is much more than that. In its core, it is a film about allurements and moral issues that a young kid of rather poor descent is facing when growing up in an environment as wild and colorful like the Bronx of the 1960's.On the one hand, the young kid Calogero, the main character, is very much attracted by the sovereignty of Sunny, head of the local MAFIA chapter, whom he does not sell to the police after witnessing Sunny shooting someone on the street. On the other hand, he also feels respect (not always) for his honest father, the bus driver, who does not want to be drawn into the MAFIA affairs and at the same time tries to prevent his son from being drawn into these. This is conflict number one.Both father figures are plaid in a very impressive manner. It is interesting to see Robert de Niro (who also directed the movie) performing very well also in the unusual role as an honest and modest family father whereas Chazz Palminteri (who also wrote the semi-autobiographic screenplay) almost manages to define his part of the big Mafioso as a new benchmark. In conflict number two Calogero has to find his way through his feelings towards a black girl and the hateful attitude of his Italian environment towards the black community in the neighborhood. Hence, the film also serves as a good vehicle to show the great racism issues of the time.There is a few more wise things in the movie that add to its quality like Sunny talking about Machiavelli's theory about availability or Calogero's father talking about wasted talent being the saddest thing in life or tests on whether to dump a girl or not.Unfortunately the film also has a few disturbing elements in it that do not allow it to be among my personal front-runners.**The acting performance of 17-year-old Calogero cannot keep up with the rest of the movie. **The love story between Jane and Calogero is not very convincing. Why should beautiful Jane be attracted by 17-year-old Calogero who is no more than a mediocre guy with a strange hat who is constantly staring at her? **The narrator describes the rockers in the bar beforehand as wild People who are used to bar fights but then they are beaten up by Sunny's loyalty like little boys. **The young Italian fellows of Calogero are pictured in a too simplistic and one-dimensional way. Do young guys really have nothing more in their minds than impressing the world by being ignorant and violent! If so the scene with them throwing their Afro-American district neighbors off their bikes and beating them up is not unnecessary brutal but otherwise …Besides these flaws, it was maybe also the multiple layers that exist in the movie that prevented it from being a best seller at the cinema box office (if quality has something to do with sales figures at all).On a final note, I also want to mention the beautiful gospel-like theme song right at the beginning and the end of the movie. Besides its beauty it also serves as a perfect vehicle to drive us away quickly from our real environments on to the Bronx of the1960's.