THE GODFATHER: PART III (1990) *** "Every family has bad memories!" This may be one for the Coppola family, although Sofia's contribution to the mediocrity of (all but the last 40 minutes) this film has been vastly overrated. Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo obviously understood that a corporate religiously respectable Don isn't going to be as fun to work with as a street shooter, but that doesn't entirely excuse the preoccupation with the Catholic hierarchy, or the ultra-lame incest thread. Andy Garcia has enough fireworks to be James Caan's son so long as he's threatening to shoot people or doing so, but his love dialogues with Ms. Coppola are absolutely painful-they're like fifth graders having to read from "Romeo and Juliet" against their will, though the lines owe more to "The Bold and the Beautiful" than they do to the favourite son of Stratford-upon-Avon. Even Al Pacino has difficulty getting near his previous heights as Michael Corleone, there's no one decent around to have a scene with. George Hamilton is probably the best part of the first two-thirds of the film as some kind of a caricature of a corporate lawyer, but he'd have been most effectively paired with Leslie Nielsen. Of course they can't let it go out that way, and don't. Having already utilized the Catholic/violence montage somewhere near the opening credits, Coppola shakes things up and out comes a tremendous beautiful prodigious vainglorious worthy appropriately volcanic and canoli saturated opera and violence montage finale. After the film I was tempted to start bitching about how silly and strange all the corporate banking Vatican and mob linking was, then I realized that one of the things I really liked about the film is how well they developed the milieu of strange and powerful currents that swirled around the papacy of Pope John Paul I.
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