By At times, the looming release of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman has felt less like a film most people will watch at home on the TV and more like an extremely expensively produced Premier League Legends five-a-side tournament.
What actually happens in it, the characters and plot, rank somewhere below the fact that Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino and Scorsese have made a mob saga together. Will it match Goodfellas? Will Arsenal hold on to beat Everton? It almost doesn't matter. As long as Robert Pires sits Tony Hibbert down one last time, and De Niro pushes up his bottom lip while smiling in his get-a-load-of-this-crazy-kid way, you've seen a ghost of that old magic.
Fortunately, The Irishman transcends that, and is a worthy coda to all four men's careers. The story follows Sheeran's memoir I Heard You Paint Houses, weaving the grappling between the Philadelphia mafia and union boss Jimmy Hoffa around and through the national traumas of the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy brothers' murders and Watergate. Sheeran (De Niro), hardened by fighting in and committing war crimes in the Italian campaigns of World War Two, becomes a hitman for high-ranking mafioso Russell Bufalino (Pesci). He rises through the ranks, and becomes a confidante and enforcer of union kingpin Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino).
Meanwhile, upstart pretender Tony Pro (the never-not-brilliant Stephen Graham) is manoeuvring to take Hoffa's place at the top of the union. The crimes escalate. Bufalino suggests Kennedy, apparently chivvied to the Oval Office with the mob's assistance, should remember "who he fucking owes". Soon, the president is dead. Quite how much of it is true is left unanswered. Uneasy alliances start to snap, the family begins to eat itself, and the circle of outrage and revenge proves unbreakable.
It's very funny at points, but it makes its point in the first scene, a downbeat mirror to the long shot following Henry into the club in Goodfellas. There, it was all about the glamour of being a gangster; here it's the loneliness. The shooby-doos of 'In The Still Of The Night' by Fred Parris and the Satins – which returns twice more later on – drift through corridors as we meet Sheeran, in a wheelchair facing away from the other residents of his nursing home. Compared to other Scorsese gangster films, The Irishman seems aware that we're more sceptical about the intrinsic worth of films about the complicated internal lives of violent men now. It's frank about the wreckage that these men leave in their wake, and how poisonous the aggressively macho workings of the world they live in are. It leaves them crumpled, and friendless, and full of regret.
These are men who speak in nods and eyebrow-flickers, never spelling out exactly how appalling the acts they talk around actually are. The film's most affecting scene sees Sheeran's daughter Peggy, always distant from her now-aged dad and Bufalino but close to funny, ice cream-loving Uncle Jimmy, finally ask the simple questions that he and his associates never dared to. Sheeran can't answer.
Rather than distract from the story's pathos, getting the old band back together for one last gig adds another layer. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they're all old men these days. Not that you'd have been able to avoid that, given how much has already been said about the CGI de-ageing tech which allows De Niro (76), Pacino (79) and Pesci (76) to play themselves over thirty years. It's genuinely impressive, aside from a disconcerting moment where a 25-year-old De Niro menaces a pair of German soldiers, but looks like he's in a Call Of Duty cutscene.
Implicit within that, though, is the understanding that this is a union of Hollywood's most revered Baby Boomer megaliths which nobody really expected to see again. Scorsese directing De Niro – even post-Dirty Grandpa De Niro – felt like a coup, but Pacino's first ever collab with Scorsese and Pesci coming out of de facto retirement? And a quick hello from Harvey Keitel? It has the feeling of tectonic plates having finally heaved themselves together, but also the feeling of an ending.
"I always thought it should be the three of us," De Niro told Variety recently. "We'll probably never be doing this kind of movie ever again." They know that time isn't on their side, and part of the draw to watch The Irishman is that you do too.
Spending millions of dollars on the fantasy of a young De Niro, Pesci and Pacino could look like an extreme case of Boomers not being able to accept that it's not 1975 anymore, but The Irishman is far better than just being a nostalgic indulgence, even with little nods to Goodfellas like a return to the Copacabana club. Everyone delivers. Scorsese's touch is understatedly masterful, De Niro is convincingly conflicted, while Pesci is watchful and sinister. Meanwhile Pacino's at his best since Heat, buckets of avuncular warmth mixed with absolutely hurricane-force screaming. We're talking Glengarry Glen Ross levels of manic howling. He operates at 110 per cent Pacino.
But don't just look at it as a heritage piece. Watching The Irishman is not the cinematic equivalent of an afternoon at Stonehenge in the pissing rain, or even of seeing some creaky musical institution honk their way through the hits for the sake of having seen them. There's a deep pathos to it, and not just because it's well-made, well-acted, absorbing and moving. You're watching filmmakers and actors who've towered over American filmmaking for the last 50 years, and they're reckoning with what they'll leave behind as much as their characters are. As impressive as the CGI is, these actors can't go back.
The Irishman is about legacy and mortality, and not just within the bounds of its slightly bloated, but not arse-numbing, three and a half hours. Scorsese's films fixate on very big questions: how do you live a good life? What gives a life meaning? How far should you submit your desires to your duty? When does ambition become destructive? The Irishman asks them all, and adds another: in the end, in the still of the night, is it worth it?
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