I thought it was good the first time through, but it didn’t old up when I re-watched it. Like others, I feel that the lack of key cast members returning and the horrible acting of Sofia Coppola are big factors.
Last year, I started this thread, in which Sofia Coppola gets a lot of the blame. Personally, I don’t think it’s a bad movie at all. Not the greatest in history, but I’ve seen far worse (as have we all, I’d wager).
I saw it on release and all i can now remember is that there was an early Costello record played by one of the characters -?Sofia’s? - ‘Miracle Man’? ‘Welcome to the Working Week’? ‘Angels Wanna Wear my Red Shoes’
There was some gangster shit going on too, but I’m buggered if I can remember that.
Big fan of the 1st 2 though.
MiM
Sofia Coppola aside, my main problem with the film is that Michael Corleone seems like an entirely different person altogether. There’s no hint of the quiet intensity and controlled power that he exudes in the first two films. And I don’t think that his getting older or having lost a lot of power reasonably explains it.
I don’t know if it was Pacino or Coppola’s fault (probably both), but I will never think of GF3 Michael as the same guy.
I didn’t like it when it came out and a recent viewing confirmed that it’s basically lumpen. Even the best bit, the intercut climax, is a rehash.
What is tantalising is the story that the original plan was for Hagen to betray Michael. The three films would thus each have climaxed with a close family member being revealed as a traitor. And surely the ending would then have been that Hagen - the ambiguous member of the family - is the one who succeeds in bringing Michael down.
Ooh… almost wish I didn’t know that. Twixt Michael and Tom it could go either way.
I didn’t think III was horrible, but certainly 1 and 2 were head and shoulders better.
GF 1 and 2 were about Michael’s rise to power (or fall from grace, same thing.) GF 3 was about his decline, and that was really the main flaw in the film (from what I can gather from what fans talk about.) Even though Sophia Coppola sucked, and Andy Garcia was not even close to Michael’s stature, there was really no good character to continue where Pacino left off (in other words, like how Pacino took over for Brando in part 1.)
So, the main flaw in GF 3 was simply that there wasn’t a character as good as Michael in it. Old man Michael just wasn’t the same.
My comments are NOT spoilered
So if you don’t want to know what BrainGlutton posted, stop reading this post here.
Mary was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I see this as a parallel to Michael’s first wife, who was killed accidentally by the bomb in the car. Mary had to die in order for Michael to die alone after having lived with his losses for a decade or two. But Mary, and Apollonia, were innocents. They wouldn’t have worked as betrayers, so they had to be collateral casualties.
And I agree that Sofia Coppola’s acting in the film was bad.
I agree. He was talky. Like a nag, he couldn’t shut up. And he never shot the “Michael glare” that was so effective in the first two films.
More unboxed spoilers.
Coppola said he filmed with 3 with an idea for 4, in which for the first time the saga would be set in (then) modern day as the family, now headed by Vincent, has devolved into street crime and crack peddlers and shakedowns- basically none of Don Vito’s thuggish nobility, just strictly thuggery. Michael would have a cameo. (He dies at the end of GF3 but it’s never really specified when- long enough for his hair to turn white and for him to age more but it could be anywhere from 6 weeks to 20 years after his daughter’s death.) Since 3 didn’t do too well at the box office (I think it made money but was nothing like the first 2 in profits) 4 didn’t happen, though he still pipes up with “I’ve got a new idea for a Godfather pic” every once in a while. (Perhaps he’ll set it partly in modern day Vegas and half in Deadwood in the late 1870s so we can have Al Swearengen advising the young Carlo Corleone before sending him back to Sicily to father Vito… makes as much sense as Altobello and the Vatican banking scandal anyway.)
I think that was the point. What you are seeing as a flaw, I am seeing as the crux of the movie: Michael *had *become a different person, as an inevitable result of the path he had chosen. And that was the purpose of the film, to explore *why *he had become a different person, and *what *the repercussions of that would be.
I think people decide to hate on this movie, because it isn’t more of the same stuff that they loved in the seventies. It wasn’t *supposed *to be!
Yeah, what ever happened to Connie’s son? (Michael’s godson, that is – the one baptized in the “Sicilian Vespers” climax in GFI.)
I 'unno. Napping with the fishes?
I’m pretty sure that he’d been singing opera for many, many years, and that Michael had probably always looked at it as just a harmless hobby, and so was shocked and disappointed when Anthony broke the news to him that he was going to make it a career. And I don’t think he was supposed to be thirty.
That’s just crazy talk.
Don’t forget Al Martino as Johnny Fontane!
For the record: I liked it. I give it a good, solid B. But when the two predecessors are A+++ movies, naturally a good, solid B is gonna pale quite a bit in comparison.
All in all, I think they did a pretty good job of filming a story that really just didn’t need to be told in the first place. Michael’s story should’ve ended with GF2 (which is, incidentally, my favorite movie ending ever).
Taken in isolation, it’s sort of ok. But as the third part of that trilogy, it’s really poor. It just doesn’t follow from the other two films.
Part 2: Michael would probably rather kill Kay than let her raise his children.
Part 3: ‘Oh yeah, remember how I changed my mind and let you live with your mother?’
Wasn’t that baby Sofia Coppola? At least I think I remember hearing that once.
That’s not what I’m saying. I expect Michael would go through changes and character development because of what’s happened to him. The problem isn’t that he’s changed. It’s that he is a completely different character altogether–in mannerisms, in the way he speaks, etc. There is no continuity in Pacino’s acting between GF II and III. It’s incredibly jarring and left me feeling like I was watching a totally different actor play Michael Corleone.