Wanderings and … wonderings.

Pip: Welcome to Wanderings and … wonderings. — where the ellipsis does a lot of heavy lifting and today, so does one very specific grievance about a Martin Scorsese film.

Mara: Ben Gould takes us deep into a movie that promised everything and delivered something far more complicated — and far more frustrating. Let's start with what went wrong in 1860s New York.

Gangs of New York: A Film That Had No Business Being This Annoying

Pip: The premise here is simple: a movie with every ingredient for greatness — Scorsese, Day-Lewis, New York, crime, religion — somehow managed to squander the lot. The question is how, exactly, and why it still stings decades later.

Mara: The post opens with a confession of anticipation turned sour, and this line captures it precisely: "This is the only Scorsese film in which he appears overwhelmed by the material, which I find completely baffling as it's about New York, crime, and religion, his cinema oeuvre."

Pip: That's the sting of it — this wasn't alien territory for Scorsese. If he loses the thread here, it isn't because the subject defeated him, it's because something in the execution went genuinely sideways.

Mara: The specific complaints stack up fast. The visual style is described as "pointlessly and relentlessly weird," depicting 1860s New York as "something out of a comic book." The editing is jarring — baroque costuming, lurching pacing, a U2 song over the closing shot.

Pip: A U2 song. Over the Twin Towers. In a period film. That's not a closing statement, that's a hostage situation.

Mara: Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio both take hits for their accents, with DiCaprio described as "evidently awed by the full-method Daniel Day-Lewis." And then — perhaps most surprisingly — Day-Lewis himself doesn't escape. His performance is called "just comedy, nothing else."

Pip: Calling Daniel Day-Lewis's work in a Scorsese film the weakest link takes a certain confidence.

Mara: The post lands on a recurring-disappointment metaphor that sums up the whole relationship with the film: "The only parallel I can think of is when you open the fridge expecting a different result from when you opened it 30 minutes prior." It closes, simply, with "Shite."

Pip: Economical. The film spent three hours; the verdict took five letters.

Mara: Strong feelings, clearly held for a long time — there's something almost affectionate in how much this film still irritates.

Pip: That's the thing about movies that almost worked. They haunt you. More wanderings next time.

What is this shit? Why does it exist? This sorry excuse for a ‘movie’ at least has one raison d’être: its purpose is to show the audience how successful and beautiful the two leads are.

Wow, congratulations.

The minutiae and the level of detail is incredible, overloaded with seemingly inconsequential pish that isn’t relevant– the bickering, and the … bickering – and then it descends into the unknown.

If you lived in a world without the internet, you’d think this was ‘real’.

It’s scary, scary in a way in that you can vicariously experience the nightmare scenario the three ‘characters’ lose their shit in.

This is the American version of Man Bites Dog (1992).

Masterpiece.

Sadly, it spawned a lot of shite.

But that’s life.

Pathetic movie, in every single facet of its putrid being.

Here we have a slapdash piss-take excuse for a motion picture, the apex of post-Lock Stock rip-off … whatever this giant bucket of crap was or wished to be. Folk swear incessantly because the writer can’t think of any dialogue.

Visually it’s bollocks, and not even in a quirky way. Every single manky British actor in this is an embarrassment, a wee college acting course scrotum barely worthy of a TV soap. Even Robert Carlyle started to grate.

I’m so happy this movie bombed at the box office because I like to see bad things on this planet fail. Samuel L. Jackson appears to feature as he wanted to conduct a bit of anthropology.

Fucking awful.