4K UHD Review: Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables Gets 35th Anniversary Edition

Directed by a “for hire” Brian De Palma from a David Mamet screenplay, The Untouchables is a violent, masculine, swaggering recreation of Al Capone and his bootlegging industry. And—surprise, surprise—Prohibition-era Chicago had almost no women. Mamet accentuates this absence of femininity by having cop Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) decide to fight organized crime when a grieving mother tearfully visits him after her daughter is killed in an explosion caused by a Capone goon. In essence, he lets the gravity of Ness’s awakening rest on the mere oddness accorded the presence of a woman.

Ness collects a small bunch of would-be vigilante cops (vigilante in the sense that since the rest of the force is corruptly suckling on the teat of organized crime payouts, their righteousness could be considered transgressive) and vows to bring down the ever-boastful Capone (overplayed by Robert De Niro). Included in his motley collective are the worldly Jim Malone (Sean Connery), bookwormy Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), and “George Stone” (actually Giuseppe Petri, played by Andy Garcia in probably the film’s only performance whose stand-offishness is sensual rather than temperamental).

Mamet provides the dependable theatrical flourishes (and I mean that in the straightest way possible), such as the way Malone’s incessant anti-Wop racism, which in the course of the movie stands in as an extension of his ultra-commanding bluster-cum-professionalism, ultimately leads him blindly into a setup. But his vanilla-smooth narrative verve never lets audiences soak in De Palma’s trademark set pieces. And the only moment where he does—the notorious (and supposedly improvised on set) Battleship Potemkin homage—is rendered utterly facile and irrelevant as a result. (What, indeed, do government sanctioned genocide and socialist uprisings have to do with nabbing a witness to testify exactly?)

Al Capone’s final words to Ness in the tumultuous courtroom finale are: “You’re nothing but a lot of talk and a badge.” Mamet must’ve been fond of this insult, as De Niro throws it out a few times during the course of the film. When you consider that The Untouchables is frequently cited as one of the great ’80s films, when other genuinely personal De Palma films like Body Double and Casualties of War are casualties of indifference, Capone’s line becomes axiomatic. Steeped in De Palma’s glorious violence and sinuous cinematography, but stripped of his tricky sensuality and his anarchic self-reflective wit, The Untouchables boils down to a lot of talk (baseball and otherwise), validated in the eyes of fanboy jocks by its badge of machismo.

Image/Sound

Paramount’s 4K disc delivers an exceptionally filmic image. The color range of Stephen H. Burum’s cinematography is intentionally limited, but it’s given a sharp boost by Dolby Vision, as evidenced by the stellar contrast and brightness balance. The transfer truly shines in the film’s close-ups, which reveal levels of texture completely absent in prior home-video releases of the film. The disc also comes with a new Dolby Atmos mix that gets an excellent workout, giving Ennio Morricone’s score an enveloping quality and ably capturing the loud room tone of speakeasies and other clandestine areas where bootleggers and mobsters gather.

Extras

All the extras have been ported over from earlier DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Untouchables. Each video runs between 10 and 20 minutes and covers a different topic, from the film’s pre-production phase to its impact on the gangster genre. Mostly consisting of archival interviews with cast and crew from around the time of the film’s release, these videos are by and large torrents of promotional platitudes.

Overall

Paramount Home Entertainment gives Brian De Palma’s opulent crime epic a home-video presentation that’s worthy of its sumptuous sense of visual invention.