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The Godfather's tag line (you know which one) even gets trotted out, so everyone can smile in recognition, I guess. The film begins with the first part of his abbreviated saga and never quite recovers from this decision. In a film with a lot of interesting and colorful character actors, DeNiro is quite shockingly not all that good. Looking back at this performance with 35 years of hindsight may seem unfair, but the tics of Travis Bickle, Rupert Pupkin, and Paul Vitti all seem in their nascent stages at various times here.

So the mystique of Vito Corleone is rubbed away, and these nostalgic "flashbacks" never coalesce into anything more than sepia-toned vignettes, but The Godfather: Part II also works too hard to emulate sequences from The Godfather for easy dramatic compare and contrast. The Communion reception for Anthony Corleone and Michael's receiving line of requests is meant to invoke our introduction to the Corleones via Connie's wedding in the first film. The juxtaposition of baptism with brutal rubouts that climaxed the first film is here given a more elegiac reprise as Michael follows through on the murders (Hyman Roth, Fredo) that will eliminate his "enemies" and isolate him completely once and for all. The key driving plot mystery of the sequel, who ordered the attempted hit on Michael in his home, is answered after a fashion, I guess, but what I find more interesting and which the film never really contemplates, is that Michael may just as well have ordered the shooting on himself. It gives him an excuse to indulge his paranoia, cast suspicion on his closest business partners, and withdraw further into the shadows of his own guilt.

Pacino is, for the most part, dynamic. This is an incredibly tricky task if you consider that the self-made trap he has built largely confines the range of his character. He has to keep his true emotions hidden, his real intentions obscured, and his reactions imperceptible. Coppola isn't as subtle, particularly in the scene where Fredo inadvertently reveals himself as Michael's key betrayer. The heavy-handed editing in this moment sinks the drama of the revelation. As in the first Godfather, casting performers who seem generically perfect (in the best sense) for the roles contributes a level of authenticity that carries the film through the structurally shaky moments. Famed acting coach Lee Strasberg and long-time character actor Michael V. Gazzo (the also-rans to DeNiro in the Best Supporting Actor category) are the best two examples of this. Strasberg is slight and completely unimposing and yet he imbues Roth with an enveloping air of menace without ever doing anything overt to create that menace. Gazzo is raspy and wheezy and slightly pathetic and with his faded, thick mustache becomes like the gangster reimagined as a dying walrus. His final dialogue with Robert Duvall easily contains the hidden levels and air of tragic regret that The Godfather: Part II works so furiously to obtain elsewhere.

I return to the quote from Michael at the start of the column. I remembered and was familiar with a lot of the quotes from Part II. Like The Godfather, Part II has chunks of great stand-alone sentences strewn throughout. But the quote from Michael strikes me as....well, fairly ridiculous. When Pacino uttered it, I laughed. And then it struck me. This is really what the second installment comes down to, for me at least. It stands as proof of Michael's edict that no one is immune from the reach of his life-snuffing grasp. I don't begrudge Coppola opting to return to world of The Godfather a second time. Nothing on screen in any way suggests that this was a cash grab disguised as an epic. His intentions seem highly noble, his desire to evolve this tragic saga even further admirable. But in this case, his reach exceeds what he delivers. The Godfather: Part II has moments that snap and crackle - Michael and Kay's verbal assault on each other, the tracking shot that follows Vito across a rooftop as he prepares to kill Fanucci - but they are few and far between.

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