Viva Riva!

Viva Riva works best as a film that will fill your eyes and I mean that in the best sense. The film looks really good from the costumes of the nattily dressed gangsters that Riva is trying to rip off to the complete flashiness of the art deco of the nightclubs that these guys rule over--the film is dripping with style. I should add that the movie is also dripping with violence also as the movie has quite a bit of violence even towards women in it throughout. Its not a film that spares someone from a beating just because she's a she.

The movie's narrative on the other hand is pretty classic. Small time hustler and thief returns to hometown and promptly falls for gangster's girl. Gangster notices and gets upset. Meanwhile the thief is being tracked down and targeted for revenge by the guys he stole from...and those guys are not playing around, they're way more dangerous then the flashy gangster. Film works really well to a point. That point would be the last twenty or so minutes (maybe even ten minutes) where the plot threads that have been forming the whole time finally come together but they don't exactly merge the way you'd like them to. I don't know if it works exactly but i enjoyed it more or less even if its not a plot you haven't already seen in many a film before.

Film is worth checking out tho if you're a fan of hard boiled crime stories or classic gangster cinema (by which i mean movies where the dames talk tougher then the anti heroes) Film does end kind of abruptly--there;s a big shootout (of course) but what happens at the end should've been made either more explicit or more final. Its interesting that i saw this not long before i saw "submarine" because while the two films have absolutely nothing in common--they both sort of suffer in comparison to other films in their genre but are both so so pretty to watch on their own that they almost make up for it in set design alone.