Ummm…so…not sure what happened between 1959 and 1979 when The Godfather 2 and The Godfather 3 took place, but apparently the Corleone family took great interest in the panty industry because our beloved Don Corleone was very much Dawn Corleone in this story to the point where I had to double check to make sure I wasn't on the Lifetime Network. Although philanthropy from a mob boss is not nearly as bad as, say, a hitman turning into Martha Stewart (Bruce Willis, you asshole), when you have such an iconic badass like Michael Corleone whining about his legitimate charity and business opportunities after dealing with two movies where he was actually being threatened because of his success, well…it's just hard to respect the guy after that. It's like if Tony Soprano opened up a world-class day care center and they spent the whole final season watching him run it.
If Godfather Part 3 had been a standalone movie about a different mob boss who was trying to legitimize himself and struggling with it, this would have been a much better movie. The problem is that as the third in the trilogy, Part 3 injected too much information from the previous movie to try to carry the story, but graciously neglected that it was two decades later. I couldn't help but watch this and think "really? After 20 years this crap is still lingering? I thought the mob had a thing for urgency." It was just petty and hard to really have any sympathy for anybody.
The quick recap of this is that Michael Corleone has gotten to the age where he's done running the family business and, trying to keep the promise he made to his, now ex-wife, Kay, he sold off all the scam businesses and went more legitimate, which has apparently been making him a killing though we're never really sure what it is he's doing. Despite the fact that he's been doing this long enough that people have gotten the idea he's done with the drugs and casinos, the up and comers in the Italian-American business elite still want to take over the family and the influence it has in the mob, which Michael goes along with because he wants to show that he may be wearing the ring girl outfit, but he can still throw a fucking punch. To prove this, he…for a reason that's beyond me because he's a snot-nosed little shit…takes Vincent (Andy Garcia) under his wing to teach him everything he knows. Despite clearly learning nothing, he becomes the Don anyway because it's an easy out for Michael and that's the goal, however, the transition process is what Part 3 focused on…and it just failed miserably. Whatever, the movie should have never existed according to Wikipedia.
In comparison to the other two movies, this was a bit of a travesty; all of the characters that had class and esteem that made them so respectable in the rest of the series were now hood ornaments on a car that was traveling in a boring, senseless direction that sent them falling to their deaths because apparently you can't effectively pass a torch to a new generation until the old one completely dies. It's as if Godfather Part 3 were solely created to kill off everyone to make way for new characters that they could potentially make movies out of. The danger and cleverness that launched the Corleone family into seeming immortality was missing and replaced with this gross attempt to atone for sins that I'm shocked didn't require some sort of breakout into song.(oh wait…it kind of did…)
Even standalone this struggled, because so much depended on what we already knew about Michael Corleone and his family, but it just wasn't smart enough to take a sensible approach to what really was just an epilogue. It was still a good watch, but to compare it to the other films makes this a disappointment and Godfather Part 3 just doesn't let you enjoy it as a solo. Utterly saddened by this poor way to remember the great Michael Corleone, I give this 7 dustbusters out of 10.
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