On the couch

The Pepsi Challenge was rigged.
For those not old enough to remember, the Pepsi Challenge was a blind taste test Coke’s one-time competition used as the basis of many an ad campaign. Poor, blindfolded schmucks would sip a small glass of two anonymous colas and pick their favourite.

Time and again Coke lost out. When given just a little bit of both drinks palettes across the world picked Pepsi.

So where are they now? If everyone loved it so much more than their biggest rival why didn’t they just use this approval to crush their enemies, see them driven before them and hear the lamentations of their shareholders?

Because people didn’t like Pepsi exactly. They liked a bit of Pepsi. Just enough to win a blind taste test.
Coke’s sweeter cousin was nice for a sip but a whole can turned most consumers off. So it was rigged. But it wasn’t rigged rigged.

And so the battle was won but the war was lost.

Gangster Squad would probably win the Pepsi Challenge. show most folk the first 40 minutes or so of Reuben Fleisher’s stylish 1940’s LA cop movie with its stellar, cast and flashes of action and they’ll be sold on its brilliance. Or at least sucked in enough to dub it a flick worth sticking with.

But they’d be wrong.

Gangster Squad is a member of an anomalous little group of films and programmes that are best left only partially watched.

Loosely based on real life, the “Squad” in question is a elite troupe of Angelino cops charged by Police Chief Bill Parker (Nick Nolte looking like a half-melted waxwork of himself) with the task of bringing down mob boss Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn looking like Nick Nolte’s waxwork before it started to melt) and his hooker-and-heroin-based empire.

Officer John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), fresh back from the war and spoiling to fight crime despite an epidemic of police corruption, is put in charge of the top secret gangster squad to “make war” on Cohen and his lackies.

“Sarge”, as O’Mara is called, recruits other tough-nosed, authority-shirking cops like himself, swlling the squad’s ranks with Robert Patrick, Giovanni Ribisi and Michael Pena as Grizzled Guy, Smart Guy and Guy With Heart respectively.

As his right-hand man he’s joined by another WW2 vet Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) who splits his time between being jaded and courting femme fatale Grace Faraday (the under-used Emma Stone) who is, coincidentally, Cohen’s “etiquette coach” and main squeeze.

It’s in things like this that the Gangster Squad’s slick veneer starts to tarnish. Most, if not all of the characters are barely scribbled creations, easy to sum up in a few words.

While the first 30 minutes or so are chock full of cool suits, snappy dialogue and the promise of great things to come, it becomes apparent that there’s nothing beyond its beautifully crafted facade.

No story, no background, nobody to root for any other reason than you’re told to.

As matters meander past the hour mark all the good will starts to wear off and, like that can of cola that tastes so sweet at the start, things come to a sticky, unfortunate and unsatisfying end.

It’s a disappointing waste of the potential for a flick that initially promised to be a sort of light-weight, frothy alternative to the soul-strangling awesomeness of LA Confidential.

James Elroy can rest easy.