The Irishman

The Irishman spent over two decades in development before Martin Scorsese finally brought it to the screen through Netflix in 2019. The long gestation period turned out to be essential. This is not the film Scorsese would have made at 50. It’s the film he could only make at 76, looking back at the genre he helped define with the accumulated weight of a career and a lifetime behind him. Where Goodfellas crackled with the energy of young men discovering power and Casino documented a system in meticulous detail, The Irishman watches old men sit quietly with the consequences of their choices. It is Scorsese’s most patient film, and for many, his most emotionally devastating.

Based on Charles Brandt’s book about Frank Sheeran, a labor union official and mob hitman who claimed involvement in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, the film spans decades of American organized crime from the 1950s through the 2000s. De Niro plays Sheeran as a man defined by compliance, someone who does what he’s told by whoever holds authority over him, from his military service through his career as a killer for the Bufalino crime family. That passivity is the film’s great subject, and it transforms what could have been another mob chronicle into something far more unsettling.

Three Legends and the Weight They Carry

The central trio of performances gives the film its power. De Niro’s Frank Sheeran is unlike any character he has played before. Where his earlier Scorsese collaborations gave him characters defined by intensity and volatility, Sheeran is defined by his emptiness. He follows orders. He does terrible things without apparent internal conflict. He moves through decades of violence with a blank competence that is chilling precisely because it’s so unremarkable. De Niro strips away every actorly flourish and plays Sheeran as a man who never developed the interior life necessary to question what he was doing until it was far too late to change anything.

Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa is the film’s most vibrant creation. Pacino brings theatrical energy and genuine charm to a man who sees himself as a champion of working people and can’t understand why the world won’t bend to his will. His Hoffa is funny, commanding, stubborn, and ultimately blind to the forces closing around him. The dynamic between Pacino’s expansiveness and De Niro’s containment generates tension throughout the film’s second half, as the audience understands what’s coming long before Hoffa does.

Joe Pesci’s Russell Bufalino is a revelation of a different kind. After years of retirement, Pesci returned for a performance that is the opposite of everything he was known for. His Bufalino is soft-spoken, grandfatherly, and absolutely lethal. The violence he commands is never delivered with the volcanic energy of Tommy DeVito or Nicky Santoro. It comes as quiet instructions, gentle suggestions, and reasonable-sounding explanations for terrible necessities. Pesci makes Bufalino the most frightening character in the film by making him the calmest person in every room.

The supporting cast fills out the world with precision. Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Jesse Plemons, and Anna Paquin all bring specificity to roles that could have been functional. Paquin’s Peggy Sheeran speaks very few lines but communicates volumes through her silent, watchful presence. Her refusal to engage with her father in the film’s later sections serves as the moral judgment the narrative itself declines to make explicitly.

The Digital Faces Problem

The de-aging visual effects, which allow De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci to play their characters across several decades, remain the film’s most divisive element. The technology smooths their faces convincingly enough in still frames, but it can’t change how they move. De Niro in his “younger” scenes still walks, gestures, and carries himself like a man in his mid-seventies. A scene where he beats a grocer on the sidewalk, meant to establish Sheeran’s capacity for sudden violence, instead draws attention to the physical limitations the effects can’t disguise. The disconnect between youthful faces and aged bodies pulls some viewers out of the film entirely, particularly in the first half where the younger versions of these characters dominate.

The 209-minute runtime is the other major barrier. Scorsese has always been a filmmaker willing to let scenes breathe, but The Irishman takes that patience further than any of his previous work. The first two hours move through decades of mob history at a pace that some viewers experience as methodical and others as punishing. Characters are introduced, their significance established, and title cards announce their eventual violent deaths in a recurring motif that adds cumulative dread but also adds to the feeling of length. The film rewards its runtime in the final hour, but getting there requires a commitment that not everyone is willing to make.

The historical claims at the film’s center also carry some baggage. Sheeran’s confession to killing Hoffa remains disputed by historians, investigators, and Hoffa’s own family. The film doesn’t present this as definitive truth, but it does build its entire emotional architecture on the assumption that Sheeran’s account is accurate. Viewers who find the claims dubious may struggle to invest in the film’s climactic sequences.

When the Music Stops

The final hour of The Irishman is where Scorsese’s intentions become fully clear and where the film separates itself from every other gangster movie, including his own. The energy drains away. The power structures that defined these men’s lives dissolve. Friends die. Families withdraw. Frank Sheeran ends up alone in a nursing home, trying to explain his life to an FBI agent who barely recognizes the names he’s dropping, attended by a priest who listens to his confession without any visible sense that absolution is possible. These scenes are filmed with a stillness that borders on cruelty. After three hours of watching these men exercise power, Scorsese forces the audience to sit with what power actually bought them: nothing. The door left slightly open in the film’s final image is one of the most quietly devastating endings in American cinema.

Should You Watch The Irishman?

If you’ve followed Scorsese’s crime films across his career, this is the capstone. It assumes familiarity with the genre’s conventions and then systematically dismantles the glamour those conventions created. It is also, in its final stretch, one of the most profound meditations on aging and regret that mainstream American filmmaking has produced. The performances alone justify the time investment.

Skip it if three and a half hours of deliberately paced mob drama sounds like an endurance test rather than an experience. The film makes no concessions to impatience, and viewers who check their watches in the first hour are unlikely to find the final act’s payoff sufficient compensation.

The Verdict on The Irishman

The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s final word on the gangster film, a three-and-a-half-hour meditation on loyalty, violence, and the emptiness that waits at the end of a life spent serving other men’s interests. Robert De Niro’s quiet obedience, Al Pacino’s theatrical charisma, and Joe Pesci’s terrifying stillness form a trio that elevates every scene they share. The de-aging technology distracts at times, and the runtime will turn away viewers who aren’t ready for its contemplative pace. But the final hour is among the most devastating work Scorsese has ever done, a portrait of old age and regret that reframes everything that came before it.