The Godfather: Part III

Note: this review is for the 2020 re-edit The Godfather Coda: The Death Of Michael Corleone I went into Godfather II expecting this amazing movie, and I was a bit disappointed. I came into this one, which has never been a good widely appreciated movie, expecting disappointment, and instead, I was surprised that it’s pretty good. Yes, Sofia Coppola’ acting isn’t great. And the whole cousins-in-love storyline is icky. Yes, it ends with a third “assassinate all the rivals simultaneously” climax, which is kinda lazy. And yeah, the threads of the business deal with the Vatican and the all the players involved sometimes get a little hard to sort out. But by and large, I enjoyed this. It had purpose, more than GF2; to tell the story of a man, in his old age. trying to defy the destiny he was thrust into to attain the destiny he wanted, and reckoning with the decisions he made along the way. All the acting (minus you know who) is well done, and I’d even go so far as to say this might be Pacino’s best of the three; the true conflict of Michael is on full display here. He is honestly trying to be better, to make amends, to not be who he was, and the system keeps fighting him every step of the way. I don’t know how this one compares to the original cut, but I enjoyed it as a cap-off to the saga.