The Godfather Part III

The chief impression is of déjà vu: extravagant ceremonies, parties, shady meetings behind closed doors. The implausible story doesn't help: Michael Corleone (Pacino), grey and bowed in 1979, misses his ex-wife (Keaton) and kids so much that he decides to abandon crime and make the family business legitimate. If it's nicely ironic that bastard nephew Vincent (Garcia), Michael's right-hand man, is almost psycopathically violent, this strand is weakened when Michael objects to daughter Mary's falling for Vincent. And the unwise insertion of elements from real life - the laundering of money through the Vatican - founders because so many details are skated over that the exact implications of Michael's brush with Old World power-brokers are often obscured. Plot apart - much of which concerns Michael's struggles to defend both his empire and his intergrity against Mafia peers - it often looks like Coppola is going through the motions. The acting is merely passable, several characters are given nothing to do, and Michael's paranoid self-pity lends the film an absurd morality: Coppola expects us to sympathise with the semblance of virtue.