The terrible movie Robert De Niro waited almost 50 years to make: “I’d read many books”
Something changed in Robert De Niro around the turn of the millennium, with an actor who’d always been so protective of their filmography and the quality of work they turned in seemingly shrugging his shoulders, saying, ‘Fuck it,’ and deciding to star in a slew of terrible movies.
Of course, he’d made bad movies before the dawn of the 21st century, but not many. However, as successful as it was, Meet the Parents became the catalyst for a shower of cinematic shit that’s seen De Niro notch an alarming number of unanimously panned pictures across the last decade and a half.
It’s absolutely not a coincidence that the worst films he’s ever been in, an ever-expanding roster that includes Godsend, Righteous Kill, The Big Wedding, Dirty Grandpa, Killing Season, Hide and Seek, and Showtime, have all been released post-2000, after the two-time Academy Award winner threw caution to the wind and became more amenable to formulaic genre flicks than ever before.
However, some of those interminable movies were in the works for a lot longer than others. In fact, one of De Niro’s most recent vehicles wasn’t only trapped in developmental purgatory for years but decades. On paper, the prospect of seeing one of the all-time greats playing two characters carried a certain curiosity factor, not that many people bothered seeing Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights to find out for themselves.
The biographical crime drama was officially announced in early 2022 and shot at the end of the year before things slowed to a halt. It was retitled from Wise Guys to The Alto Knights in late 2023 but didn’t arrive in cinemas until March 2025, where it promptly tanked after failing to recoup even 20% of its production budget.
Pulling double duty as Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, De Niro isn’t the worst thing in the film. It’s decently made, and the leading man is clearly game for a challenge, but it’s painfully derivative of a hundred other mob movies, 99 of which are vastly superior.
Known for his diligent research, De Niro had plenty of material to sift through, knowing he had two parts to master: “There was not as much as I thought there would have been,” he told Total Film. “But there was enough for me on Genovese and Costello. And books I’d read, many books on Costello.”
Not only did he have many books, but he had plenty of time. As it turned out, De Niro had first discussed the project five decades previously with his The Deer Hunter director, Michael Cimino, so the prospect of playing a real-life crime boss in a feature had been lurking at the back of his mind since the 1970s.
“Irwin Winkler wanted to do a movie,” he recalled of his first conversations about what would ultimately land on the silver screen in 2025 as The Alto Knights. “He talked to Mike Cimino, and Cimino talked to me about the Costello character in the late ’70s.”
Half a century later, those talks finally bore fruit. Was it worth the wait? De Niro enjoyed himself, which is clear from his performances, but with the studio losing a massive amount of money and the film feeling destined to be forgotten in no time at all, it’s hard to say so.
