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| Al Pacino, Talia Shire, Diane Keaton,
Andy Garcia, Joe Mantegna, Sofia Coppola |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Michael
Corleone (Al Pacino): I betrayed my wife. I betrayed myself. I killed
men and I ordered men to be killed. Ah, it's useless... I killed --
I ordered the death of my brother. He injured me. I killed my mother's
son. I killed my father's son.
Don
Michael Corleone attempts to legitimize his Mafia empire but soon sees
affairs slip beyond his control.
 Having
already achieved the impossible by improving on a masterpiece in The
Godfather Part II, this belated third entry in the trilogy sees
a director well past his prime revisiting the characters and themes
of his most universally acclaimed works. But either Coppola no longer
had it in him, or Fate simply would not be tempted a second time, for
Part III simply fails to live up to its illustrious predecessors.
Even should one attempt not to engage in direct comparisons with the
previous two films, this last episode is a flawed film at best, though
it does contain sequences that are in the finest Godfather tradition
if taken on their own.
But the film as a whole just contains too many dead moments to fully
engage the viewer's attention. The younger cast members are neither
sympathetic nor very credible, and Al Pacino has a tendency to chew
the scenery with his overblown performance. Sofia Coppola, who has since
regained favor as a director with The
Virgin Suicides, is indeed a kind of vacuum presence near the
center of the film, but she is hardly the one to blame for the film's
final failure. As Coppola himself concedes in his audio commentary,
any failure in the film was his own, and The Godfather Part III
can legitimately be viewed as a film from an experienced but also exhausted
old hand, whereas the first two still carried the energetic spark of
youth. |
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Released
in the same version worldwide on 9th October 2001, it marks the first
release of all The Godfather movies on DVD in one package of 5
discs: The Godfather DVD Collection. The following links offer
in-depth reviews of the other two movies and the extras disc:
The
anamorphic widescreen image is framed at an aspect ratio of approx.
1.78:1. One would expect this last part in the trilogy to have the best
transfer. But oddly enough, the transfer for this most recent entry
in the trilogy is the one that suffers from the most problems: the image
is much grainier than one would reasonably expect from a film its age,
and the familiar brown-tinged cinematography in this case seems unnaturally
processed and overdone (though this may in part be due to the original
processes used to achieve a result similar to the first two films).
Shadow detail is overall very low, and black levels seem shallow and
often grayish.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio mix on the other hand is much stronger than
the new 5.1 presentations of the first two movies (which were mostly
drawn from the original mono elements). Crowd scenes and wide exteriors
make good use of the surround stage to present a credible outdoor sonic
environment, and the music especially benefits from the nicely detailed
sound stage.
Francis
Ford Coppola's audio commentary track for the third - and least
popular - film in the trilogy may actually be the most interesting one
to listen to, as it provides the filmmaker with an opportunity to speak
frankly about some of his more questionable decisions and to answer
the many points of criticism that have been leveled at the film since
its initial release. Coppola is his usual self, both arrogant and touchingly
open-hearted, and some of his most revealing comments concern the similarities
he sees between himself and the Michael Corleone character, especially
with regard to the person he was when he made the first two, and the
changes effected on him by his experiences on Apocalypse Now (from
which he never recovered).
For an in-depth critical discussion of the full disc of extras, see
our separate feature on The
Godfather Collection - Extras Disc.  Animated
menus offer three options and when you retun to the main menu from any
of the three options you'll notice there are three different menus available,
all tastefully done with an image from the movie and with fitting music
from the score. Navigation is easy.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed: 2001
Click
here for IMDB info on The
Godfather Part III.
Click here
to return to the front page.
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