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Post-war noir thriller is slinky, swanky and about as smart as a Studebaker. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

In post-war Los Angeles, 1949 to be exact, the streets are bathed in neon light, the gallantly bulbous cars rumble over the roads, the men all have bruised knuckles, the women are dames and every talks as if they stepped from the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel. This is the stylized, romantic vision of Ruben Fleischer's (Zombieland) Gangster Squad. Think of it as the love child of Curtis Hanson's LA Confidential and Brian De Palma's The Untouchables - but fluffier. Way fluffier.

Based on the allegedly non-fiction book that suggests a phantom elite squad of the LAPD was created to fight organized crime - in particular east coast gangster Mickey Cohen - Gangster Squad is all style and little substance. Excitable and righteous, John O'Mara (Josh Brolin) recruits a corp of dedicated cops that fly under the brass radar to start a guerilla war against the psychotic Cohen (Sean Penn, hamming it up and seeming to have a good time). Among his crew are jaded ladies' man, Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), tech geek Conway Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi) and old school cowboy Max Kennard (Robert Patrick, who makes everything he's in just a little better). They bust his casinos, hijack his heroin shipments and generally cause all the trouble they can in order to disrupt his criminal enterprise and prevent him from getting a foothold in California. There's no point in detailing the gruesome (and it is surprisingly, explicitly gruesome) path because it's a familiar one. You know someone on the squad is going to die, you know there's going to be a crisis of faith/conscience/purpose by at least one of the crew, and you know someone's marriage is going to suffer.

Gangster Squad looks really, really great, and production design Maher Ahmad deserves a great deal of the credit for making the film work on any level - because Will Beall's script certainly doesn't try very hard. It's about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the knees, and there's lots of faux hard boiled chitchat that really only works for Bogart: "Who's the tomato?" Jerry asks a buddy of Grace Faraday (Emma Stone); "I bet you got a ducky story behind that lighter," Grace breathily intones when they finally meet. It's as if a middle school student who read a Mickey Spillane story and was asked how people talked in the 1940s wrote the dialogue. This is a goofy diversion that no one is going to mistake this for high art, but even by those standards not nearly enough forward momentum as a crime drama and with the exception of O'Mara and Wooters, the rest of the squad might as well be invisible. Keeler is there to tug at the heartstrings (he has a son!), but the squad's lone black officer, Coleman Harris (Anthony Mackie) and only Latino officer, Navidad Ramirez (Michael Pena) barely leave an impression. They're elite, secret minority cops. In Los Angeles. In the 1940s. There's no story there? Depending on how you take him, Penn is the highlight in a spitting, snarling turn as the nutbar Cohen that hints the Oscar-winning actor is about to make a career detour into Campy-ville la Robert De Niro. But if you're not up for the thinking slavery provokes, Gangster Squad could be the tonic.

Gangster Squad opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

(HK Edition 01/19/2013 page4)