Donnie Brasco (2000, DVD)

"A wise guy's always right. Even when he's wrong, he's right." Lefty Ruggiero Donnie Brasco is the story of an FBI agent who penetrated the inner circle of the famed New York Italian underworld. The real agent was named Joseph Pistone and he wrote the book this story is based upon. His underworld name was Donnie Brasco, hence the title of the film. Brasco (Johnny Depp) became known by hanging around the fringes of the mob and making it known he was in the jewelry business. "Don da Jeweler" gets approached privately by a real mafioso, Lefty Ruggiero (Al Pacino) who wanted to sell a hot diamond.

It was a match made in heaven. Like black and white in a cookie (yes, that s Seinfeld reference, if anyone is keeping count). Abbot and Costello. Laurel and Hardy. James Bond and his flavor-of-the-week girl. I could sit here naming names all day, but I ll just get to the point: Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. Both considered to be in the upper echelons of their respective generations and both of them fine actors. And both of them, in the same movie. (Well, this paragraph sure sounds like an ad, doesn t it?) Joseph Pistone (Johnny Depp) is a New York City cop who gets assigned to a ver special case.

It pays to have a sense of where you are, in the development of a genre. Like anything else, a genre has a life cycle which it goes through before it ends up moribund, drops off the face of the earth, and comes back again - to entertain a whole new generation. Donnie Brasco is a film that understands this point. It knows where it is in the genre of the gangster flick. For my father's generation, The Godfather (1971) was that genre's shining star. But even it was a reinvention, pulled off at a time when the genre was thought to be long-since dead. Coppola's genius was to use that story, taken..

Donnie Brasco may not have the epic qualities of Coppola s Godfather series, nor the dynamic construction of Scorcese s Goodfellas, but this under rated Mafia film ranks at the top when it comes to emotional intensity, character development, and revealing the inside nature of the Mob. Much of the film s authenticity comes from the fact that it s based on the true story of FBI undercover agent Joe Pistone, who infiltrated the New York Mafia, nearly becoming a made guy. Pistone served as a technical director to the film and remains friends with Johnny Depp, who brilliantly portrays him in one..