Capone Review: 4 Ups & 5 Downs

3. It's A Refreshingly Unflattering Biopic

Rather than try to deliver an all-encompassing Al Capone biopic, Trank's film is aggressively focused on the final stretch of his life, which ensures it's an uncommonly warts-and-all, shamelessly ugly depiction of a real-life subject.

Though it rarely makes for pleasant viewing, seeing this mythic figure boiled down to an ill man who spends most of the movie coughing up a lung and soiling himself is a relatively creative way to re-contextualise the man's near-folkloric stature in society.

Trank's refusal to indulge the glitz and the glamour most viewers expect of gangster cinema means it'll instantly turn many viewers off.

After all, seeing a man mentally unravel for 100 minutes rarely qualifies as entertainment, but for all of the film's frustrating concessions to biopic formula, it's at least totally unafraid to get bogged down in the weeds.