Double dose of De Niro is half as good as it should be

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Set mostly in the 1950s and taking its name from a defunct social club once frequented by the Mafia in New York’s Little Italy, “The Alto Knights” follows the rivalry between Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, childhood friends turned competing Mafia bosses, and their maneuvering for control of the Luciano crime family. Although the fact-based story was written by Nicholas Pileggi, acclaimed for his work chronicling organized crime as co-writer and/or producer of such classic mob movies as “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman,” the new film proceeds with all the plodding style and slack suspense of a cable TV documentary about a falling-out between members of a heavy metal hair band.

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Call it “Behind the Murders.”

Narrated in retrospect by an octogenarian Costello (Robert De Niro), whose voice-over and occasional direct-to-camera reminiscence guide us through the story’s dutiful twists and turns, “Knights” begins with a botched assassination attempt. Returning home on the evening of May 2, 1957, Costello is shot in the head by Vincent Gigante (Cosmo Jarvis), a hit man ordered by Genovese (also played by De Niro) to eliminate Costello from competition.

Somehow, Costello survives. The bullet “bounced off his head,” a goofy, apologetic Gigante explains to an irate Genovese. The film then cuts between Gigante and Genovese arguing and the injured Costello, sitting bandaged up in the hospital with the calm of a man who just knocked his noggin, though his white shirt is spattered with blood.

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The juxtaposition plays like awkward comedy, setting a weird, hybrid tone for the rest of the hard-to-categorize film, which bounces among flashes of dark humor, tedious exposition and bloody violence. Immediately after the botched assassination, the film jumps back to the 1930s so that director Barry Levinson (“Diner,” “Rain Man”) can retrace the disintegration of the friendship that leads to – and beyond – the shooting.

The gimmicky double casting of De Niro, which producer Irwin Winkler has attributed to a spontaneous whim after initially offering De Niro just the role of Costello, fails to deliver twice the bang for Winkler’s buck, as you might expect. Instead, it simply makes an already confusing story that much harder to follow.

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The action unspools with a hodgepodge of standard biopic scenes, black-and-white reenactments of flashbacks, historical photographs and Costello’s narration, interrupted by sporadic on-screen titles like “United States Senate Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce” or “People v. Vincent Gigante, September 12, 1957.” To be honest, titles might have been more helpful whenever the dueling De Niros are spliced together on-screen, with little to distinguish one from the other except a prosthetic nose, a hat, a pair of glasses or the thickness of a New York accent. (This may explain why late-night host Seth Meyers joked to De Niro, during a recent appearance, that seeing the actor and his doppelgänger side by side reminded him of the famous scene in “Taxi Driver”: “You talkin’ to you?” Meyers cracked.)

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It also invites the question: Why? There’s no subtext about Costello and Genovese being two sides of the same coin. Costello, anointed to run the Luciano crime family after Charles “Lucky” Luciano was imprisoned, is described as cautious, liking things nice and orderly in his quiet suburban home life with his wife, Bobbie (Debra Messing). Genovese, on the other hand, is a hothead, a mercurial underboss who resented Costello’s ascension and who, it has been suggested, may have murdered a man to marry his widow (Kathrine Narducci). The double casting is not just unnecessary, it’s supremely distracting.

Then there’s Pileggi’s apparent historical revisionism. “The Alto Knights” culminates in an infamous conclave of the country’s Mafia bosses that took place in Apalachin, New York, at the upstate farmhouse of Mafia capo Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara in November 1957. (During the car ride up there, Genovese and Gigante bicker back and forth about the history of the Mormons in a bizarre conversation reminiscent of Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield’s small talk about McDonald’s hamburgers in “Pulp Fiction.”)

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Maybe the meeting really happened the way “The Alto Knights” says it did – no spoilers here – and at the behest of the person Pileggi’s screenplay suggests: a behind-the-scenes power play that left “no fingerprints” by the real operator.

Who knows?

The speculative ending is actually the most intriguing thing about “The Alto Knights,” more interesting even than De Niro times two. And yet the film’s climax nevertheless fails to raise much of a heartbeat in this boglike slog through a momentous moment in murderous mob history.

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One and one-half stars. Rated R. At theaters. Contains violence and pervasive crude language. 123 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.

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