It's a lazy, watered down gangster flick that is not nearly as clever or as new as it attempts to be.

| Original Score: D+ | Sep 7, 2017

Gangster Squad is slight pulp fiction that offers all-out, balls-to-the-wall action riddled with as many clichés as bullets.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 1, 2017

Those who are calling it shallow and cartoony and clichéd are missing the point. It is all of those things, purposefully - gleefully, even.

| Jun 21, 2016

Gangster Squad looks the part, but it's so superficial it practically evaporates before our eyes.

| Feb 5, 2013

Some of the clothes and makeup feel as glossy as paint, but, those aside, we seem to browsing through a display of secondhand goods.

Full Review | Jan 21, 2013

"Gangster Squad" never stops reminding you that everyone in it thinks it's awesome that they're making it. You won't feel the same awe watching it.

| Jan 11, 2013

It's watchable because of the colorful recreation of L.A. in 1949 (thanks to cinematographer Dion Beebe and production designer Mather Ahmad) and its appealing cast...

Full Review | Jan 11, 2013

It might sound like a stretch, imagining Penn playing that intense, indiosyncratic a villain. But the lauded, veteran actor pulls a left hook, then a right, and after a wild bodyshot at the tail end of the film, you see the true mania behind his eyes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 11, 2013

Director Ruben Fleischer and screenwriter Will Beall can't decide whether to make a spoof or a serious drama, so they wrongheadedly attempt both.

| Original Score: C | Jan 11, 2013

I love Fleischer's Zombieland, think Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin, & Emma Stone are among the most underrated actors alive and think Sean Penn is an all-time best. And yet I nearly hated this mess.

| Original Score: 2.0/5.0 | Jan 11, 2013

It's Los Angeles, 1949, and the clichés are flying like bullets.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 11, 2013

Gangster Squad is to the great tradition of the Scarface genre what plastic is to cutlery - tiny, imitative, disposable.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 11, 2013

"Gangster Squad" talks tough and hits hard, but it is a victim of its own brute force.

| Original Score: C | Jan 11, 2013

A cartoonish 1940s shoot-'em-up that's impossible to take seriously.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 11, 2013

The redundant violence, no matter how loud and brutal it can be, lacks both tension and imagination. We get plenty of bangs without any of the requisite foreplay.

| Original Score: 40/100 | Jan 11, 2013

Director Ruben Fleischer leans hard on the violence card, but with little return in the way of excitement, and at the expense of character and story.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 10, 2013

Slick, sick, self-consciously stylish and defiantly shallow, Gangster Squad is one of those movies you can't talk about without invoking other (often better) movies.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 10, 2013

A triumph of production design but a pretty dull kill-'em-up otherwise.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 10, 2013

Apart from the gore -- and there's plenty -- this is basically L.A. Confidential without the script.

| Jan 10, 2013

A virtual catalog of uneven filmmaking, which includes the plot and many of the performances.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 10, 2013