The 8 Heaviest Gangster Movies of All Time, Ranked
Lots of gangster movies are heavy-going, obviously, but not all. Pulp Fiction has a couple of intense scenes, for example, but it’s not really a super heavy or depressing movie. And then you’ve got something like Scarface, which is very much a tragedy and has bad things happening to its main character (and most of the other characters, honestly), but the style and bombast there makes it all go down a little easier and honestly feel kind of fun.
As for the actually super downbeat movies about organized crime, that’s what you’ve got below. These are some of the darkest and heaviest gangster movies ever made, all of them going the extra mile to stress that whole notion of crime not paying, at the very least. Some of them go further and get more upsetting still, but usually with good reason. And, for what it’s worth, all of these depressing gangster movies are pretty great quality-wise, too.
8
‘Battles Without Honor and Humanity’ (1973)
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Image via Toei</figure>
Battles Without Honor and Humanity was a movie that kicked off the series of the same name, and it’s a yakuza movie more than it is a strict gangster movie, if you’re a stickler for definitions, but the yakuza is a kind of criminal organization, so this movie counts. It’s also the best movie in its series, though all of them are pretty downbeat, chaotic, and unapologetically violent, all the while telling something of an overarching story, though it can be hard to keep up, by design.
Broadly speaking, there’s a complicated gang war being fought throughout this one, and a whole lot of people double-cross each other and end up dead. It’s a series of tense situations and sometimes violent ones, or sometimes a bit of both at the same time. Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) is a lot, and maybe even close to too much, but in a good (and admirable) way, for the most part. And it is absolutely downbeat and cynical, too.
7
‘Pusher’ (1996)
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Image via Magnolia Pictures</figure>
Though he gained attention for making some later crime films (namely, Drive and, perhaps more infamously, Only God Forgives), Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Pusher came first, and it’s a bit more straightforward. It’s still challenging, though, just in a different way, as while it’s about a criminal in a deadly situation following a deal that goes wrong (so, easy to follow), it’s got some rather intense violence and is undeniably gritty.
The extent to which that main character is in danger also makes things feel hectic and heavy, and if all that’s not enough, it’s the first part of a very heavy-going trilogy, too. Pusher does work wonders with what might sound like a slightly too lean premise and what seems like a pretty slim budget, though you do probably need a decently strong stomach to get through it in one piece.
6
‘Killing Them Softly’ (2012)
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Image via Inferno Entertainment</figure>
Seeing the words “an Andrew Dominik film” should tip you off that you’re in for a likely feel-bad time, since he was behind both Blonde and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and so it’s not too surprising that him tackling the gangster genre with Killing Them Softly made for a pretty downbeat time. It is still an engaging film, and maybe even a slightly darkly funny one at times, but all of that is found alongside some serious nihilism, and also, no one in this film comes anywhere close to feeling morally sound.
It’s all very dark, gritty, and largely compelling, and while it’s entertaining to some extent, you’re unlikely to come away from it with your spirits raised.
Narratively, Killing Them Softly is about the aftermath of a card game robbery that was supposed to be protected by the mob, so it being targeted has serious consequences, with Brad Pitt‘s character being tasked with cleaning up the whole mess as best as possible. It’s all very dark, gritty, and largely compelling, and while it’s entertaining to some extent, you’re unlikely to come away from it with your spirits raised, to say the least.
5
‘Casino’ (1995)
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Image via Universal Pictures</figure>
When breaking down the two fast-paced gangster epics Martin Scorsese directed in the 1990s, it’s safe to call them both – Goodfellas and Casino – quite brutal and relatively unromanticized, at least in some regards. But Goodfellas feels gentle if you’re directly comparing it to Casino, since this 1995 film is far more cynical, it contains a good deal more explicit violence and language, and the characters are almost entirely without redeeming qualities. Concerning the last of those, some characters in Goodfellas do feel human and are at least a little endearing.
Well, okay, the characters in Casino are also human, with many based on – or inspired by – actual people, but they are meaner and crueler people than what you’ll find in most gangster movies. It also doesn’t pull punches in showing Las Vegas as (at least for a time) a violent and totally corrupt city, all because the mob could run the place through owning so many casinos. Casino is pretty much three hours of betrayals, beatings, murders, arguments, threats, and robberies. It is relentless, but maybe it has to be.
4
‘Infernal Affairs’ (2002)
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Image via Media Asia Distribution</figure>
Infernal Affairs is a Hong Kong gangster movie that has a premise you might be more familiar with thanks to The Departed being a remake. And sure, The Departed is plenty intense, and also fairly downbeat, but it does have a slightly neater ending than Infernal Affairs. It’s hard to elaborate without going further, but what can be said is that the story is the same either way: there are two people who’ve gone undercover, with one being a detective who’s undercover in a gang, and the other a gang member who’s gone undercover in the police force.
It’s all cat-and-mouse stuff, and it’s also the kind of story that can’t end well for everyone, though there’s a ton of suspense in anticipating whether it can end well for anyone. And if you know what’s coming, or if you think you know what’s coming (like, if you’ve seen The Departed first), it’s still great… just don’t expect anything too uplifting here. To further compare it to The Departed, Infernal Affairs might be more straight to the point and perhaps faster-paced, too, for what that’s worth.
3
‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984)
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Image via Warner Bros.</figure>
Once Upon a Time in America does what a lot of great epic movies do by feeling sprawling in some ways, but then it also manages to achieve a feeling of being quite personal and intimate in other regards. If you look at things chronologically, it’s about a group of young boys who grow up to be ruthless gangsters, making much of their money during the Prohibition era, and then at least one lives into old age, and he grapples with various memories of his violent past.
That’s simplifying things for sure, because Once Upon a Time in America does not play out chronologically, with the previously alluded-to old man looking back on his life, and these play out in a series of sometimes strange flashbacks… and then things get even more unusual – and even surreal – in the film’s “present.” All the while, Once Upon a Time in America works as a deconstruction of the whole gangster genre, so it’s deeply upsetting, oftentimes violent, and totally unafraid to have its main characters do numerous terrible things throughout.
2
‘The Godfather Part II’ (1974)
When The Godfather (1972) ends, it’s definitely not happy, but it still feels lighter in comparison to The Godfather Part II. There was a good deal of murder and tragedy to be found in the first movie, sure, though it’s the sequel that bumps things up a notch in those regards, especially because the family side of the first film is on its way to being broken by that film’s end, and then you see the Corleone family (and crime empire) well and truly break down in The Godfather Part II.
It’s a downfall for Michael Corleone, mostly, and he suffers a sort of death in every regard but physical (since The Godfather Part III exists, so he kind of has to make it to there). The Godfather Part II is about him losing friends, family, and much by way of hope of becoming legitimate. The film also contrasts Michael’s downfall with his father’s rise in the past, so that adds another layer to things in terms of it being a tragedy and all.
1
‘The Irishman’ (2019)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
While The Irishman isn’t as violent as Casino, it is a more harrowing and overall sadder film, and you can use it to help make the argument that age has made Martin Scorsese a better filmmaker, in some ways, alongside being a more brutally honest one. Not that his earlier films were lacking those things either, yet if you look at Silence, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon… like, come on. They’re all pretty despair-filled movies.
As a gangster movie, The Irishman is about as dark as things get, and the whole movie pushes things further than Once Upon a Time in America, looking at a person affiliated with the mob aging and looking back on the most violent and life-changing events from his past, usually with regret. All the characters either die suddenly (and usually gruesomely) or they live overlong ages and deal with losing everyone else. The final act of The Irishman is particularly concerned with such things, and it’s an absolute downer in ways that are hard to put into words.
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