Review: The Film, The Untouchables...

I love me a good mob film. Goodfellas, The Godfather, and The Long Good Friday are among the finest examples. These films typically center on an antihero—often an ambitious newcomer rising through the ranks of an urban organized-crime network.

Yet some films approach the genre from a different perspective, portraying tradition and institutional order with a degree of admiration. The Untouchables (1987), one of Brian De Palma's (Blowout) most accomplished works, is a notable example. The film follows federal Treasury agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner, Bull Durham) as he attempts to dismantle the sprawling bootlegging empire of Chicago mob boss Al Capone (Robert De Niro, Heat). With corruption embedded throughout the city's institutions, Ness faces a daunting struggle that often seems to offer no clear path to victory.

After a fruitless and embarrassing sting operation, Ness assembles a small team of law-enforcement professionals whose integrity he can trust. His first recruit is veteran beat cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery, Highlander), a wise and formidable Irish American officer who teaches Ness the “Chicago way” of fighting back. Next is federal agent Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith, Starman), a bright, straitlaced accountant from Washington whose financial expertise proves invaluable. The final member is police recruit George Stone (Andy García, Ocean’s Eleven), a gifted marksman who conceals his heritage to pursue a career in law enforcement. With this compact but capable team, Ness can concentrate his efforts on disrupting the illegal liquor trade and bringing Capone to justice.

The film achieved substantial critical and commercial success upon its initial release. Directed by Brian De Palma from a screenplay by David Mamet, the film drew praise for its stylish direction, evocative period design, and carefully sustained tension. Its craftsmanship also received significant awards recognition: the film earned four Academy Award nominations, with Sean Connery winning Best Supporting Actor. Patrizia von Brandenstein, William A. Elliott, and Hal Gausman were nominated for Best Art Direction–Set Decoration; Marilyn Vance received a nomination for Best Costume Design; and Ennio Morricone was nominated for Best Original Score. Together, these honors reflect the film’s success in combining compelling performances with distinctive visual and musical artistry.

Critics have long admired Brian De Palma’s energetic direction, the film’s richly detailed recreation of 1930s Chicago, and its carefully constructed action sequences. The celebrated Union Station shootout is especially notable for its deliberate homage to the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). David Mamet’s screenplay gives the familiar conflict between law officers and gangsters a brisk, memorable rhythm, while Ennio Morricone’s expansive score reinforces the atmosphere of Prohibition-era Chicago. Reception was not uniformly enthusiastic, however. In his contemporary review, Roger Ebert praised the costumes, sets, vehicles, locations, and Sean Connery’s performance but found the direction heavy, the central characters underdeveloped, and Robert De Niro’s Capone too detached from the main narrative. The film’s relationship to history also deserves some qualification: although Eliot Ness and his campaign against Capone were real, the screenplay fictionalizes much of the plot and reshapes the people and events involved. These liberties make the film less reliable as an historical account, but they also help explain its effectiveness as a polished and highly theatrical gangster drama.

Viewing the film through critical theory reveals additional complexity beneath its polished Prohibition-era gangster narrative. A Marxist reading, for example, draws attention to capital accumulation, institutional corruption, and class conflict. From this perspective, Al Capone appears not only as a gangster but also as an exaggerated capitalist figure who organizes crime as a profit-driven corporate enterprise. His influence over the police and local government illustrates a central concern of historical materialism: political and legal institutions may reflect and reinforce the economic relations on which they rest. Ness and his team, meanwhile, can be interpreted as salaried agents caught between personal ideals and the demands of a compromised bureaucracy. Their position loosely echoes Marx’s concept of alienation, since their labor serves an institutional order they cannot fully control. This interpretation does not exhaust the film’s meaning, but it offers a useful way to examine how wealth, power, and public authority interact within its moral universe.

Viewed through feminist film theory and gender studies, The Untouchables places masculine relationships at the center of its narrative. Male bonding, mentorship—especially Malone’s guidance of Ness—and physical sacrifice become the principal routes to loyalty, authority, and honor, creating a distinctly fraternal world. Women, by contrast, remain largely peripheral. Ness’s wife (Patricia Clarkson, The Station Agent) is associated with an idealized domestic sphere that the male hero must protect, while other women generally function as background figures or collateral victims rather than independent agents. This imbalance invites comparison with scholarship on the male gaze, which examines how films can privilege masculine perspectives while sidelining female subjectivity. The film also presents masculinity as something Ness must repeatedly prove: he begins as a restrained bureaucrat but gradually adopts Malone’s harsher methods, culminating in his violent confrontation with Frank Nitti. From this perspective, Ness’s transformation can be read as the film’s uneasy suggestion that moral authority depends upon embracing the same patriarchal violence it initially condemns.

A psychoanalytic reading offers another productive way to understand the film’s central conflict. Through Freud’s structural model of the psyche, Capone can be interpreted as an embodiment of the id: he pursues pleasure, wealth, and violence with little regard for restraint or consequence. Ness, by contrast, initially resembles the superego, insisting upon moral rules and the authority of institutional law. The narrative complicates this opposition, however, by suggesting that strict legality alone cannot defeat Capone. Ness must negotiate between principle and aggression, functioning less as a pure superego than as an ego attempting to manage competing demands. A Lacanian interpretation shifts the emphasis from personality to the relationship among desire, language, and the symbolic authority of law. From this perspective, Ness’s crisis arises when the legal order he trusts proves unable to regulate Capone’s power. His eventual adoption of more violent methods may therefore be read as an effort to restore symbolic order, although the film leaves an unsettling question: can the law preserve its legitimacy when its defender begins to resemble the criminal he opposes?

A postmodern reading highlights the film’s intertextuality, heightened style, and transformation of history into popular mythology. Rather than presenting Prohibition-era Chicago as straightforward historical reality, De Palma filters it through earlier cinematic traditions. The most famous example is the Union Station shootout, which deliberately reworks the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). The film also borrows the moral structure of the Western: as Yale University Library’s film notes observe, Mamet conceived the story around the relationship between a young, idealistic lawman and an older, disillusioned mentor, while Chicago becomes the equivalent of a lawless frontier town. These layers of quotation make the past feel less like recovered history than a story assembled from familiar film genres and images. In this sense, The Untouchables approaches what Jean Baudrillard termed hyperreality, a condition in which polished representations can appear more vivid and persuasive than the reality they replace. The result is a mythic, operatic version of Prohibition that favors cinematic memory and emotional intensity over strict historical accuracy.

The ensemble is undeniably charismatic, yet several performances work more through familiar star personas than deep characterization. Kevin Costner plays Ness with clean-cut sincerity, tracing a convincing path from inexperienced reformer to hardened federal agent; still, his restraint can sometimes make Ness seem less vivid than the figures surrounding him. Sean Connery provides the film’s emotional center as the weary, streetwise Malone, combining physical authority, humor, and memorable dialogue in a performance that earned him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Robert De Niro’s Capone is deliberately theatrical and visually imposing. His extensive preparation—reading about Capone, studying footage, gaining weight, and altering his hairline—creates a memorable presence, though the character’s limited screen time leaves him feeling more like a series of grand set pieces than a fully developed antagonist.

The younger and less prominent members of the ensemble provide a useful counterbalance to these established stars. Andy García brings welcome sharpness and confidence to George Stone, particularly during the Union Station sequence, even if the screenplay gives him relatively little interior life. Charles Martin Smith offers an effective tonal contrast as Oscar Wallace, grounding the team with intelligence and quiet determination; however, the character remains primarily a narrative device for introducing the tax case. Taken together, the performances give the film much of its energy and accessibility. As the American Film Institute’s cast overview suggests, the film’s appeal depends heavily on this collection of distinctive screen personalities, even when its supporting roles are drawn in broad strokes.

Ultimately, The Untouchables is a gripping crime thriller that offers a refreshing variation on the traditional gangster film. Rather than romanticizing a criminal’s rise and fall, it centers on the law officers struggling to challenge Al Capone’s power within a deeply corrupt city. By combining raids, courtroom strategy, and the comparatively unglamorous pursuit of tax-evasion charges, the film presents justice as both dramatic and methodical. Its historical liberties and broad characterization may invite criticism, but its energetic direction, memorable performances, and moral tension make it easy to recommend. Add this film to your TBW (To Be Watched) List.