You have to be absolutely out of your mind to legitimately think that this is Scorcese at his best and ignore all the flaws in this movie. Yes, I get it, he made a lot of great movies in his time, but this isn't one of them.
A scene early on with Deniro beating someone up sums up the movie pretty well. The random no-name actor getting beat up is the only one exhibiting any emotion, as Deniro's character and his daughter sleepwalk their way through the scene like most of the cast does through most other scenes. It can be a bit hard to tell though since the camera zooms out so far that you can hardly see their faces, probably in an effort to avoid using the piss poor de-aging effects during an "action" scene, but it doesn't much matter because it's still close enough that we can see Deniro noticeably physically struggling to get through the scene. It looks awful and its depressing to see Deniro like this and to realize that Scorcese thought this scene was ok like this (why would they not have just used a stand-in here?), and this is pretty much how the movie feels in general.
This is a very noticeably weak effort from Scorcese. Most of the characters are wooden and just seem bored to be there. Pesci and Deniro are shockingly lifeless here. Pacino seems to be the only one giving any effort, but even his performance only comes off like a pale imitation of his old self.
Again, the de-aging effects are very weak and it's pretty jarring to see the flashback version of Deniro's character be referred to as if he's a young man (Pesci even calls him KID), but still looks like he's about 50.
There are a ton of side characters introduced, most of which disappear immediately after their introductions and serve no real purpose. Likewise there are many vestigial scenes that serve no purpose to advance either plot or character.
The plot is of course your typical gangster fare that we've seen from Scorcese so many times already. Guy gets into a life of crime, rises in the ranks, gets rich and lives it up, and then everything comes crashing down because he and everyone else he knows are absolutely terrible people, blah blah blah, we've seen it all before, but you know, you take something more recent of his like The Wolf of Wall Street and even though it uses that same old formula it still manages to be interesting because the characters have such personality and style and they keep your eyes glued to the conflict even though you already know exactly where it's going.
Here? Not so much. The Irishman is an absolutely unremarkable mobster story with completely forgettable characters that don't seem at all interested in their roles and some production values and cinematography that the so-called king of cinema should be embarrassed to be associated with, and let me tell you, you people defending this weak excuse for a film aren't doing Scorcese or "cinema" any favors by blindly swallowing this crap and acting like it's the greatest thing you've ever seen. If you're so willing to suck down any product, no matter how bad, just because it has a big time famous name attached to it than you're really no better than the popcorn action movies and fans that you're so quick to condemn.
As someone who's seen every Scorcese film before this, this is a 5/10 AT BEST and I will never pretend otherwise just because he did a lot of great films in the past.
