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Chicago, 1922: Jack McGurn's (Sean Faris) a good kid, he wants nothing
more than to become a prize fighter, so much so that he has changed his
Italian name to an Irish one as Irish boxers are more likely to be
accepted by the audience. He's such a good kid that he turns down the
offer of a gangster to enter the bootlegging business - that gangster
being Al Capone (Milo Gibson). Sure, technically his father is also in the
booze trade, making his own wine despite the prohibition - but basically
poppa's just a grocer who sells the wine under the counter to make a
couple of bucks on the side ... which is too much for Bugs Moran's (Peter
Facinelli) mob and thus Jack's dad is gunned down right in front of his
shop. This, and the fact that the police does do nothing to solve the
crime, being on Moran's payroll, turns Jack cynical, and consequently he
turns to Al Capone and asks if the job offer's still good - and turns out
it is. Jack's only condition is that Capone finds out for him who killed
his father. Jack proves to be a good soldier for Capone, and soon rises
up in the ranks, up to his second-in-command. At the same time, the fight
between Capone's and Moran's gangs gets more and more violent, to the
point where Moran wants Jack out of the way and pays two goons to shoot
holes into his body - which they do, but rather by a miracle, Jack
survives ... and now he wants revenge on Moran and his men - which
directly leads to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, where Jack's the
instigator and lead gunman. But Moran escapes the bloodbath rather by
accident. Thing is, this event finally turns the public opinion against
the gangsters - who so far have mainly been the public's suppliers of
alcohol - and the FBI takes over from local lawmen to take gangsterdom
down one man at a time. Which is pretty much the beginning of Al Capone's
(and consequently also Jack's) downfall ... True, Gangster
Land doesn't re-invent the wheel, and it hardly lives up to Martin
Scorsese's gangster epics in quality - but at the same time it does
remarkably well for a low budget gangster flick, taking cues from genre
films from decades ago and telling its complex story in a very compelling
way that ticks off all the right boxes and gives the audience what it
expects in tension, action and violence rather than trying to reinterpret
things in a post-modernist way. Basically it's a cool period gangster
flick that doesn't try to be more than it is but delivers on its promise!
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