Two of New York City’s most notorious organized crime bosses vie for control of the city’s streets. Once best friends, petty jealousies and a series of betrayals set them on a deadly collision course.

Robert De Niro playing an infamous mobster is nothing new. But De Niro playing TWO mobsters? Throw in legendary director Barry Levinson of Bugsy, Rain Man, and Good Morning, Vietnam, now that’s something worth writing home about, right? Unfortunately, The Alto Knights is anything but; a film with maybe some potential on set that was completely butchered in the editing room. De Niro’s dual performance is supposed to fascinate the audience but instead distracts. Frank Costello and Vito Genovese are not presented in the film as being two sides of the same coin, as were the mobster twin brothers Kray, played by Tom Hardy in Legend. In this film, the two mobsters are depicted as not just of different families and mannerisms but of different ages, experiences, and motivations. When De Niro finally shares the screen with himself, it’s impossible to buy these disparities as the script depicts them, rather we buy them more like equals under different heaps of makeup, which was not the intention. As Costello, De Niro is giving something between a less soulful version of his turn in The Irishman, a less extravagant version of his turn in The Untouchables, and a less funny version of his turn in Analyze This. He’s interesting as Genovese, but casting another actor to oppose him would’ve worked better to show that one of these gangsters is actually much more frightening than the other.

The film recycles tired tropes of past popular mob films, and as I’ve alluded to here, many of them already star the great De Niro. Though some scenes are at least mediocre in their execution, the editing is horrendous and makes some scenes unwatchable. The film insists on blasting through most scenes like a documentary montage rather than letting scenes breathe and feel like a thrilling drama. The constant narration and barrages of exposition are condescending to its audience of a normally intelligent genre, but insists on feeding us information we could’ve learned through context clues within scenes. The poor dialogue can’t be salvaged by lacking performances from Debra Messing and Cosmo Jarvis, the latter of whose promising transformation never quite gets to shine. Moreover, there never feels like an escalation of tension or events when there feels like we should be building towards something, rather a lack of setup that also leads to a lack of reward. The Alto Knights starts on a bad foot, and never even hints at a chance to redeem itself. Even De Niro and crime film fans need not waste their time, in theaters or at home.