Lansky

Lanksy is a workman-like film with decent production values, but Rockaway is not Scorcese or Coppola. There are no great faults to find with it, except one: fans of the genre have literally seen every element of it before.

Lansky loses steam every time the focus is on somewhere other than Lansky.

Keitel . . . infuses his performance here with more than enough lion-in-winter gravitas to dominate every moment he is on screen, and quite a few when he isn’t, which in turn is sufficient to propel Lansky through stretches when the passing of time is felt, and the budgetary limitations are obvious.

Never as giddily awful as Gotti, this movie suffers more from a case of what film critic Andrew Sarris called “Strained Seriousness.” Except the ostensible seriousness here never runs particularly deep. Lansky is for Keitel completists only.

Writer-director Rockaway (“The Abandoned”) hits all the major bullet points in the gangster’s life but ignores almost all the connective tissue that would make this outline of intriguing anecdotes really come alive.

The mob movie tropes and cliches end up being the only memorable moments in Lansky, material so overfamiliar we can finish the lines before the actors do.

The heart of this movie, directed by Eytan Rockaway, is the relationship between the writer and his subject. So it’s dismaying when Lansky turns out to include flashbacks, with John Magaro (“First Cow”) playing a much flatter version of the mobster as a young man.