The critical lauding of Goodfellas has always irked me, because my experience of watching it has always felt equivalent to sitting through a three-hour snuff film in which the perpetrators of the most disgusting acts stop, smirk at the camera, and essentially say, “Ain’t I a cool guy?”

It’s not that I abhor “unlikeable” characters in the usual regurgitated critical sense most people subscribe to. It’s that I simply don’t want to watch innocent people being murdered by the most base, vile, conformist thugs imaginable — as anyone would. Critics seem to turn a blind eye to this while swooning over the long takes and technical bravado. It makes me feel ill.

Scorsese’s earlier films treated murder and violence as something that demanded guilt. The violence was meditated upon. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is a reprehensible human being — a pervert and drug addict with zero wit or charm. I despise him, yet the film’s power lies in showing how society itself created a man like him. It poses a genuine moral quandary: are his “good” intentions and actions merely symptoms of a prolonged societal disease, or are they part of an inescapable cycle? The film never empathises with him or casts him as a victim; it is pure, lacerating social satire. There is none of that moral weight or self-awareness in Goodfellas.



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