Angel of Evil The story of an enemy of the statePosted by Dreier Bay on June 8th, 2021 The Americans may not have invented the mafia, but they made it a model of success - at least in terms of film. The "The Godfather" parts, "GoodFellas" and several epigones of the "Family" epics run as reliable as an old Volvo, be it on TV or in the imagination of media-influenced consumers. The films show rooms in subdued light, men in elegant suits with machine guns and of course Marlon Brando, in the semi-darkness behind closed curtains and with a dangerously calm voice. So the question of what aesthetics an Italian production like "Angel of Evil" might be able to counter this American sfumato is all the more exciting. Admittedly, the comparison is unfair. Nevertheless, it can be said that Michele Placido cannot find any new facets in the gangster film. This is partly due to the indecision of the film, which cannot decide on an aesthetic direction until the end. The biography of Renato Vallanzasca (Kim Rossi Stuart) shows a clear, long-term career plan: Already as a child with considerable criminal energy, he terrorized the city with his friends as a young man. With growing ambitions, he gathers a team of professionals with whom he commits robbery after robbery. Even various stays in prison cannot slow him down in his thirst for action. In this way, Vallanzasca soon becomes the most notorious criminal in the country. But that's not all: he becomes a star and a heartthrob, a media myth, the epitome of the "old school" gangster ...
The most convincing thing about "Angel of Evil" is the main actor Kim Rossi Stuart. With his diabolical charisma and anarchic-tempered gesture, he gives the character of Renato Vallanzasca a frightening presence. The fact that the other characters appear like side lights, however, is not the supposedly too strong play of Stuart owed, but rather a lack of fictional depth. This fact points to a central weakness of "Angel of Evil", namely the too chaotic and hectic script. With the claim to tell the complete biography of the gangster Vallanzasca and by completely concentrating on his skin figure, the script misses out on laying a resilient foundation. The dialogues are mostly monosyllabic and hardly memorable, between the action sequences there is hardly any space for scenes that could bring the viewer closer to the motifs and essence of the characters. It is also unfavorable that the story, although told in a fairly straightforward way, is often not exactly easy to understand. Too much is stabbed, robbed and shot and too little is explained or embedded in larger contexts.
Director Michele Placido admits that he "glorified Vallanzasca a bit". That cannot be dismissed out of hand and explains the indignation of politicians, the judiciary and survivors in Italy.
movies online without ads with this, apart from any moral reservations, is that the stylization of the Criminal as a superhero doesn't really work aesthetically, because the figure just doesn't carry that far, despite the convincing performance of Stuart. It is also equally devastating that "Angel of Evil" constantly goes back and forth between gangster ballad, high-gloss production and simple action riot lurches and comes dangerously close to the metaphorical ditch. An example of this is a sequence which, obviously based on "Ocean's Eleven", is the composition of the Vallanzasca professional team - a rather flat ingratiation, without the director being able to stand up to his American counterpart Steven Soderbergh in terms of style.
The fact that "Angel of Evil" remains at least mediocre in terms of quality is thanks to its main actor and the overall high tempo. It is particularly unfortunate that the biography of Vallanzasca, which is actually of considerable importance for the criminal history of Italy, is not embedded in a socio-historical context It would certainly have been interesting to get to know the social conditions of the origins of organized crime in the export country of the Cosa Nostra and thus also the mafiosi nightmares of Hollywood.
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