Product Description

This motion picture event from acclaimed director Martin Scorsese earned 10 Academy Award(R) nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, along with 5 Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Song! Leonardo DiCaprio (TITANIC), Cameron Diaz (CHARLIE'S ANGELS), and Daniel Day-Lewis (THE BOXER) star in this epic tale of vengeance and survival! As waves of immigrants swell the population of New York, lawlessness and corruption thrive in lower Manhattan's Five Points section. After years of incarceration, young Irish immigrant Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio) returns seeking revenge against the rival gang leader (Day-Lewis) who killed his father. But Amsterdam's personal vendetta becomes part of the gang warfare that erupts as he and his fellow Irishmen fight to carve a place for themselves in their newly adopted homeland!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3271 in DVD
• Brand: BUENA VISTA HOME VIDEO
• Released on: 2003-07-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 167 minutes

Amazon.com
Gangs of New York may achieve greatness with the passage of time. Mixed reviews were inevitable for a production this grand (and this troubled behind the scenes), but it's as distinguished as any of director Martin Scorsese's more celebrated New York stories. From its astonishing 1846 prologue to the city's infernal draft riots of 1863, the film aspires to erase the decorum of textbooks and chronicle 19th-century New York as a cauldron of street warfare. The hostility is embodied in a tale of primal vengeance between Irish American son Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his father's ruthless killer and "Nativist" gang leader Bill "the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis, brutally inspired), so named for his lethal talent with knives. Vallon's vengeance is only marginally compelling; DiCaprio is arguably miscast, and Cameron Diaz (as Vallon's pickpocket lover) is adrift in a film with little use for women. Despite these weaknesses, Scorsese's mastery blossoms in his expert melding of personal and political trajectories; this is American history written in blood, unflinching, authentic, and utterly spectacular. --Jeff Shannon

DVD features
The plethora of extras on this two-disc set are worth your time. There are several well-produced segments on the physical aspects of the film highlighted by a tour of the vast Cinecittà Studio sets with director Martin Scorsese and production designer Dante Ferretti (with a 360-degree-view feature to boot). Historian Luc Sante introduces you to the Five Corners area in New York circa the mid-19th century, and there's a vintage vocabulary guide (from the 1859 edition of The Rogue's Lexicon). Even though it was made as a "puff piece" for the movie, the Discovery Channel show "Uncovering the Real Gangs of New York" is an informative half-hour on the film's historical background. There's another espresso double-shot from a Scorsese commentary track. Not recorded traditionally as he watches the movie, the track pieces together thoughts from the director including some recorded in an NPR interview. This allows Scorsese to be even more focused, dealing with the history of the time and his own 30-year struggle to make the film. One serious demerit for stretching the feature film over both discs, which most likely had to be done with having both Dolby 5.1 and DTS tracks along with the commentary on the long film. --Doug Thomas

From The New Yorker
Daniel Day-Lewis, returning to movies after a spell of shoemaking in Florence, disports himself with royal assurance as the voluble thug William Cutting (Bill the Butcher) in Martin Scorsese's generally unsuccessful epic about nineteenth-century gang life in New York. Wielding knife and cleaver, this vengeful brawler makes spectacles of blood that he knows are gratifying to others. He's a self-amused monster, and Day-Lewis does what he can to give this semi-coherent production some theatrical panache. Scorsese and his screenwriters (Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan) never succeed in linking together the intimate personal dramas and the endless gang war between the nativist Yankees (i.e., Protestants) and the new waves of Irish immigrants. The movie isn't boring, but it's heavy-spirited, obvious, and grisly, with an emphasis on knives and blood that borders on the fetishistic. Scorsese shot "Gangs" in Rome's Cinecittˆ, and the picture has some of the depressive feverishness of "Fellini Satyricon," which was also shot there-the jeering spectators mounted in multitiered sets, the furtive life of the crime-ridden metropolis, with its hapless poverty, its barbaric entertainments, its obscure and unredeemed suffering. The movie also stars a sullen, stolid Leonardo DiCaprio as a young Irish immigrant eager to avenge the death of his father, Cameron Diaz as a prostitute and pickpocket, Liam Neeson as a fallen Irish leader, and Jim Broadbent as the corrupt political boss William Tweed. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Where is the director's cut?!?!
One of the big controversies surrounding this film was that Martin Scorcese was forced to cut nearly an hour of footage from his final vision in order to get the studio to release it. That's understandable, as not many people will be willing to sit through a 4 hour movie in theatres. So with the release of it on DVD, we should get the complete version, right? Well... it doesn't seem so.

The details on this DVD mention nothing about extra footage. Isn't one of the benefits of the DVD format that we get to see what the director intended before politics and marketing step in? I for one would like to see the COMPLETE movie, the movie that Scorcese wanted to make, rather than the movie which was released, even though that movie was quite good.

I have a feeling that the studio is just doing the usual DVD scam of releasing the theatrical version as soon as possible to catch people while they are still hyped on this movie from the theatrical release and post-Oscar boost. After a few months, hopefully they will release a director's cut, causing many people to go back and buy the DVD a second time. I, for one, will wait as long as it takes until the full version comes out. I'm sick of getting scammed by these studios into buying one version, and then seeing a "special edition" with all sorts of extras come out a few months later. Not gonna happen this time, buddy-boy.

Godawful Blu Ray disk
Disney just slapped the old transfer made for the DVD on this BD disk. The DVD was notorious for bad image quality with grotesquely overdone digital sharpening and noise filtering. The Blu Ray is the same, justh with additional resolution to see all the uglyness with enhanced clarity.
This is a crap transfer that should be withdrawn immediately or it will damage Disney's reputation of releasing high quality HD disks. Yes, it is this bad compared to the state of the art from Disney and other studios.

Almost (Not Quite) Cohesive
Prior to seeing it for the first time in a theatre, I knew that this film had been a project which had taken director Scorcese about 30 years to complete; also, that a replication of much of mid-19th century New York City (notably the Five Points area) had been created within the vast Cinecitta studio complex in Rome. After sitting through another viewing of this 168-minute film, my thoughts and feelings remained mixed. Pluses? Daniel Day-Lewis' portrayal of William ("Bill the Butcher") Cutting, the various sets which seem like archival photos brought to life, the creation of an ongoing (almost subliminal) sense of menace, and the skillful use of historical material concerning political corruption, emergence of the so-called "melting pot" culture, Civil War conscription, race riots, etc. This context helps to explain the nature and extent of the bloody hostilities between Cutting's Native Americans and Vallon's Dead Rabbits.

However, this film also has a few weaknesses which include what I view as DiCaprio's hollow portrayal of Priest Vallon's son, Amsterdam, who returns to avenge his father's murder after years of severe abuse in an orphanage. Scorcese's preparations for Amsterdam's final, inevitable confrontation with Cutting should have been as sharp as one of "Bill the Butcher's" carving knives...but aren't. Stated another way, the pacing of the narrative seems to me disjointed and thus much less effective than it could and should have been. Also, I think some of the scenes are too busy, too crowded for no apparent reason. I'm not referring to street scenes which are generally handled very well.

One last opinion, more a quibble than a complaint: I wish Scorcese had done more with Neeson's character prior to his death which occurs so early in the film just as I wish Shakespeare had revealed just a bit more about Hamlet's father. I can easily understand why Cutting has always been the unquestioned leader of the Native Americans. Ironically, when reminiscing about Priest Vallon, "Bill the Butcher" seems to think more of him than Scorcese does....certainly more of him than Scorcese allows his audience to.