Robert De Niro appears as Vito Genovese and Frank Costello in The Alto Knights [Warner Bros Pictures]

THE ALTO KNIGHTS
Directed by Barry Levinson
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆

NO wonder this tale took decades to get off the storyboard and be given the green light.

It is based on real events and would do well to be a hefty tome of a book, rather than a fictionalised version of the rise of the American Mafia.

It went through a number of rewrites and aborted productions over the past three decades, and now director Barry Levinson has tried to squash the best part of 60 years of organised crime into a racy narrative.

Despite the quality of acting and the high production values, it feels a bit too hit and miss because of the sheer depth of material.

It tells the story of New York Mafioso bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese – here both played by Robert De Niro – who grew up together, committed crimes together and then fell out.

The personal tale of the pair could have made for an interesting narrative and character study. But instead the Mafioso politics of the period, and FBI boss J Edge Hoover’s decades long denial that the Mafia was a real entity, creep in as side plots and make it neither one thing nor the other.

We learn that Frank and Vito grew up in cold water tenement flats, scavenged dimes, and decided they weren’t going to be as skint as their immigrant parents had been.

Prohibition offered the chance to get rich quick and showed that laws were not always good and therefore could be broken.

Vito is forced to leave the US after he attracts to much heat, handing over his syndicate to Frank to look after.

But his time away is stretched by the war, and when he does return, Frank isn’t keen to pass back control.

Vito has got into the drug business, which does not sit too kindly with Frank and other Mafiosos.

A battle for control gets under way, and we are given a ringside seat as Italian American mobsters growl at each other.

Levinson tries to give it some gravity by using apparently archival footage of New York.

But this is like a low rent knock-off of the super Once Upon A Time In America: it is well acted, well shot and captures a mood and a time.

But it’s script and plot arc feel half baked and leaves you sensing that a great film, like a Mafia victim, is locked in a car boot, kicking and screaming to get out, but denied the chance by the hoodlums that steal centre stage.