This film received an incredible amount of praise at this year's Cannes Film Festival and has since been submitted by Italy (and in the process become one of the frontrunners in the foreign language category) for this year's oscars. It is effectively a mob film about a real life "war" between various factions of organised crime in Naples. The film uses a largely non-professional cast and it doesn't really show, the ensemble is decent, but the best work is done by veterans Toni Servillo and Gianfelice Imparato. Where the problems arise though are in the narrative and the execution.
There are lots of little stories cobbled together here and told in a collage, some interlink and others don't. We are shown a young boy tempted into crime having to choose the path opposite to his friend, a pay-off man entering said boy's estate to provide for the families of loyal men, a couple of youngsters trying to go their own way in the crime world (giving us probably the most pathetic scene in years with both of them in their briefs firing guns into a river) and a senior man and his assistant in charge of getting contracts from companies to dump toxic waste.
The latter part is where the real problem with this film arises, it deals with very serious issues and a wider subject matter of great "importance", but the film does nothing to put those issues into a dramatic context. The film flits and shifts between people (I'm very reluctant to call them "characters", because that would imply characterisation has taken place) and has no narrative whatsoever. Most of the sub-plots are completely divorced from each other and none of them have detailed characterisation or any kind of legitimate drama within to give the audience anything to get their teeth into.
What the audience is left with is a series of sparse, disparate scenes melded together with no finesse and lacking in any involvement emotionally or intellectually. They have given us people in situations but no reason to care for the characters or even worse find what they are doing and is happening to them even mildly interesting. It's a turgid mess, with no reward for even the most patient of audience members. I'm amazed it has a 15 certificate here (as it has violence, swearing and nudity), it's just another example of a film getting praised to high heaven at Cannes and having very few redeeming features. I could not possibly recommend it even to fans of mob films, this just has very little going for it.