Once in a while a very
special kind of movie comes along...one that is intoxicating in its ineptitude,
to the extent that it will leave you dizzy afterwards, and possibly laughing
uncontrollably about it for days on end. Samurai Cop...Manos, the Hands of Fate...GETEVEN...Verotika...the
latest addition to this family is made man Sonny Capone, and he is here to make
"so bad it's good" movie merchants an offer they can't refuse.
A Mafia epic relocated
to an Irish council estate, there is a dozen or so plot strands running around
in circles here, seemingly designed to let any local resident who fancied their
chances playing an onscreen hard man their moment in the spotlight. What plot that
is legible evolves around Sonny Capone (Gerard Daly), a Dublin born gangster
who gets elected the head of the Mafia in Rome, only to then discover he has
terminal cancer, only to then discover he has a son he never knew about, only
to then have to travel back to Ireland to avenge the death of the son he never
knew about...who has been murdered on the orders of local drug dealer James
"The Predator" Barrett. Production values are next to zero, if not
minus zero, scenes supposedly taking place at the headquarters of the Mafia in
Rome look that they were shot upstairs at the local job center, with someone's
granddad cosplaying as a cardinal, and someone else's granddad dusting off
their impersonation of Brando in the Godfather, the one that went down a storm
at the local working men's club about forty years ago. For a scene where Sonny
stages a kidnapping at the Israeli embassy, the set designer's idea of evoking
the location appears to have been to draw the Star of David onto blank pieces
of paper, sellotape them to doors and hey presto an instant Israeli embassy is
born. When it comes to cost cutting audacity you have to hand it to them, Sonny
Capone is a film with very big balls. Along the way there is plenty of feckin'
swearing and plenty of feckin' fighting all delivered with the amateurish
enthusiasm of authentic, but hard to understand Irish accents and put on, even
harder to understand Italian accents. Sonny Capone amounts to ninety odd
minutes of yelling "WTF am I watching" at the screen. In a beyond distasteful
subplot, Palestinian terrorists, who having become downhearted at the lack of
'likes' their beheading videos have been getting on YouTube, attempt to
increase their number of YouTube subscribers by murdering naked Jewish men in a
makeshift gas chamber...which also allows the film to throw full frontal male
nudity into the mix. There is also the revelation that one of the gangsters has
been keeping a decaying female corpse around...Norman Bates style...a prop that
looks straight out of a joke shop...you're only amazed that the Sonny Capone
crew remembered to cut the price tag off it.
Aimed squarely at the
post-pub supermarket DVD crowd... Sonny Capone is the type of entertainment
that under normal circumstances might be described as a "beer and
curry" movie...only I doubt either could be consumed during this film
without being spat out of your nose and mouth. Sonny Capone writes its own
eulogy when one of the eye-talian goons remarks "get the fuck out of here
with this leprechaun crap"... or as the philosophical Sonny himself might
put it "dares more tar life dan deet". I implore you to "catch
yourself on" and see this film, if only for the entirely selfish reason
that I don't want to be alone in my suffering.
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