Review: Piranhas, As a Riff on Goodfellas, Plays Things Too Safe

With its depiction of teenaged would-be gangsters tooling around dilapidated corners of Naples, Claudio Giovannesi’s Piranhas immediately calls to mind Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, which is also based on a novel by Roberto Saviano. Another, perhaps inevitable, point of reference is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, a touchstone for films about youthful dreams of mafia ascendancy running up against the messy reality of a gangster’s precarious life. Piranhas even appears to quote the most famous shot from Scorsese’s film, as, at one point, a Steadicam shot follows Nico (Franceso Di Napoli) and his girlfriend, Letizia (Viviana Aprea), through an exclusive entrance into a high-end nightclub and to their reserved seats at this Copacabana for small-time Naples wise guys.

Giovannesi undercuts the glamour that Goodfellas allowed to cling to the mafia image by subbing out its adults in flashy, tailored suits with teenagers in tacky graphic T-shirts purchased at a dinky, criminally overpriced shop. There’s a grimly comic aspect to this story about a group of teen miscreants taking over organized crime in Naples’s Rione Sanità neighborhood. As Nico and his friends cruise through the narrow streets of the historic Italian city on diminutive gas-powered scooters, pointing guns haphazardly at the area’s real gangsters, the film both creates a sense of dissonance and underlines its point that organized crime essentially operates at the emotional and intellectual level of a teenager anyway.

Nico is already an enterprising small-time criminal heading a rabble of similarly aged friends who burglarize Rolex shops and vandalize public Christmas trees in rival districts when he undertakes to rout out his neighborhood’s branch of the Neapolitan mafia. After he observes his mother (Valentina Vannino), who runs a laundromat, struggling to make the protection payments extorted by the local hoods, he ostentatiously befriends the slightly older Agostino (Pasquale Marotta), whom the mob considers a pariah because his father is collaborating with the Italian police. The two hatch a plan to displace the current don despite the fact that Nico and his friends are currently working for him, handily stealing a pistol from a local cop and procuring more guns from rival gang leader Don Vittorio (Renato Carpentieri).

Throughout the group’s devious machinations and brazen attacks on the ruling mob, however, we’re reminded that Nico is still a child, living at home with his mother and his younger brother, Cristian (Luca Nacarlo). Nico’s plans, executed with about as much meticulous planning as one would expect of a teenage boy who still depends on his mother for breakfast, don’t go exactly as expected, and one anticipates with each successive crisis that Nico and his friends are done for. To the credit of Giovannesi and his co-writers, Saviano and Maurizio Braucci, they withhold any simple moral catharsis, in which the boys’ rash decisions would result in irreversible consequences, from the viewer. At least at first, the boys are rewarded for their wanton violence, and now flush with cash, Nico can impress the relatively innocent Letizia with lavish gifts, pulling her into the burgeoning quagmire he’s created.

Throughout, Di Napoli compellingly embodies a too-big-for-his-britches ambition, born of a life in the margins of Naples, a youth spent observing high-end goods intended for tourists and mobster high-rollers through shop windows. In his evident care for his family but deep disregard for other lives, Nico exists to show the audience how the incomplete socialization of teenage boys results in a strange admixture of total callousness and extreme sensitivity—the manner of infantile sociopathy precisely suited to a mafia don.

Despite the clarity of Di Napoli’s performance as Nico, however, Piranhas doesn’t ultimately conclude with the profound impact one suspects it’s aiming for. As the net of rival gangs and resentful, ousted mobsters close in on Nico and his friends, the story beats get predictable, the cascade of dramatic events a bit rushed. Despite the initial shock of witnessing these young people put themselves in such a dangerous position, the broader arc of the film, as well as its polished neorealist visual style, feel overfamiliar and even a bit safe. The images of Nico’s gang of menacing naifs on their high-end motor scooters are memorable—and the phenomenon of ruthless, super-young Neapolitan mobsters apparently very real—but Piranhas is more an interesting tweak of Goodfellas than an eye-opening social statement.