Legally, I’m Required to Say “Killers of the Flower Moon” Was Good

Note: This is a spoiler free review of Martin Scorsese’s newest film. I promise to not ruin the movie for you…but I am going to try to make you not want to see it.

The movie was slated to start at 6:30. 15 minutes of previews and other nonsense later, the movie finally started. After what felt like seven hours, I looked at my phone to see if it was almost over. It was 8pm. I still had over two hours ago. Weakness fell upon me. There was no escape. Just a vanity project. A vanity project that would never end.

Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is a well regarded book by author David Grann about a not-so-distant past in America that we collectively should be more ashamed of than a certain sub section of our society is. It dug into the growing need to build a police force that had jurisdiction over not only federal land, but native land after a string of murders rocked the Osage tribe in the 1920s after it was discovered that they had large oil deposits in their native land.

Killers Of The Flower Moon (movie version) is over three hours of Martin Scorsese proving he could still fellate himself at the ripe old age of 80 and our desires as a movie going public to pat him on the back about it.

Why do I say that? Because for one thing, not enough is being made about the runtime of the movie. At nearly three and a half hours long, the movie is made to be watched on the couch on a lazy Sunday (after football season ends) where you can stop watching and come back to it several times. It’s an HBO mini-series stitched together to challenge you, as the viewer, to not fall asleep in a Cinemark. I might have actually liked the movie if Scorsese had found a way to shave 45 minutes off of the movie, and I can assure you, he could have. Roughly half of the movie was just Leonardo Dicaprio looking as dumb as humanly possible.

Leonardo Dicaprio is one of the all time good looking fellas. Just an all time handsome dude. But oh my god, as much of this movie as possible is spent making him look dumb. When I say dumb, I don’t mean mentally dumb, which, I can assure, he is in this movie. No, I mean make Leo look physically dumb. A lot was made before the movie came out about the fake teeth Dicaprio uses for his character. The teeth might not be in the top three things that makes him look stupid! His default facial expression is “desperately trying to poop a toaster while also trying to have an under bite.”

The movie doesn’t have to be bad. Lily Gladstone is absolutely FANTASTIC as Molly Burkhart in a role which should be a star turn for her. Lily’s ability to convey so much through her eyes and facial expressions is the thread that keeps this entire movie from going off the rails at multiple points.

Without going into spoilers, here are some issues I had with the movie as I desperately tried to keep up:

*This is a serious movie. The murders are based on a very real series of events that happened. They didn’t need a series of one line quips that make it feel like the murder was played to the point of parody. This isn’t an episode of CSI and you don’t need a bumper going into the commercial break. Multiple times this happened.

*Around an hour and a half into the movie I had to stop and reset because I couldn’t tell if the story was operating chronologically anymore and had to make sure I hadn’t fallen asleep and missed something.

*I understand that Robert De Niro is nearly 243 years old. But his resting face in this movie is that of a person who looks like he is trying to resist being tickled. He is 80, and started the movie playing someone in his mid 40’s. He ended the movie playing someone in his late 40’s. I understand that Martin Scorcese only wants to make movies with certain actors, but De Niro in the role is the prestige cinema equivalent of Steve Buscemi with the skateboard going “Hello fellow youths.” I spent the entire movie thinking the character was semi-age appropriate to De Niro’s actual age. Then, the movie ended with a post script of sorts that noted that his character lived another 40 years in real life. And. My. Brain. Broke. If I live another 40 years, people will be pretty impressed. Robert De Niro was 41 when I was born. I understand that movies are a suspension of belief. BUT THERE ARE LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF ACTORS WHO COULD HAVE DONE THIS ROLE AND BEEN MORE BELIEVABLE! Then I looked at how old Dicaprio’s character was compared to Leo and my brain just kid of melted and leaked out of my ear.

You almost have to stick with the movie until the end because it’s so mind bogglingly self indulgent that I had to look around to make sure everyone else was seeing the same thing as me. There is a TV edit of this movie that does cut a lot of unnecessary filler, is fine lined to around two and a half hours, and feels like a concise movie with some fantastic acting. But this movie in it’s current form feels like a movie in which nobody is allowed to give studio notes or recommend edits. This is pure “lets Scorsese cook.” And I guarantee people are going to say it’s a great movie. It’s a victory for the Osage people. They will posit potential awards for everyone involved.

And i’m sure I’m going to receive hate from the type of people who take this slight personally. They will thumb their nose at me. Their name will probably be something like, oh, I don’t know, Matt Drufke.

If sitting in a movie theater knowing you are going to have the life sucked out of you for what feels like 7 hours is something that interests you, then by all means, go. If you have things to do instead, such as work, apple picking, stealing catalytic converters, etc, then go ahead and wait for this movie to be On Demand or streaming on whichever bootleg cable you use so you have the ability to pause the movie and go outside and touch the grass or feel the sun or something.