Gangster Squad

The big shootout in Ruben Fleischer’s film is not the one first filmed. As shot, mobsters fired submachine guns through the screen at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre audience, spilling into the street. After the Aurora attack of July 20, 2012, Warner Bros. pulled the trailer, moved release from September 7, 2012 to January 11, 2013 and reshot the sequence over five days that August. The violence now falls in Chinatown, its target the police unit, not moviegoers. The real unit was created in 1946 by Chief Clemence B. Horrall, largely for the city’s image, not by William Parker as here; Parker was 45 in 1949, while Nick Nolte reads as a man in his seventies. Mickey Cohen goes to Alcatraz for murder in 1949 here; his real terms came in 1951 and 1961 for tax evasion. The lead pipe attack on him in prison is accurate. The roster is edited too: the real squad was white throughout, so the Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña characters are invented. Conwell Keeler dies first on screen, yet outlived the others, dying of a stroke in 2012. A good fit if you watch knowing that gunfight was reshot, its target switched from audience to cops. Not for anyone matching the squad to the record: its founding, roster and Cohen’s downfall are all altered.