Without on-screen assurance that most of this courtroom farce's dialogue was drawn verbatim from court transcripts, you'd dismiss its vaudeville antics as sheer baloney. Veteran director Sidney Lumet's shambling spectacle, based on the 1987-88 trial of 20 members of the New Jersey branch of the Lucchese crime family, is certainly evidence that truth is stranger than fiction, but it's also tedious and shockingly uninvolving. Its center is the larger-than-life "Jackie Dee" DeNorscio (Vin Diesel), a wisecracking Lucchese wiseguy and midlevel racketeer with his finger in a bakery's worth of illegal pies. Jackie is lewd, crude and uneducated, but he loves his family — his...
Released:
2006
Rated:
R
Length:
123 mins