Feels Good to Be a GangsterFascinating facts and interesting stories about organized crime: gangs, gangsters, mobsters, the mafia, and other criminals & crime syndicates all over the world.
Help shape these rankings by voting on this list of 17 Movies You Forgot Had An Organized Crime Subplot
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Vote up the most unexpected organized crime subplots.
Some of the best movies ever made have been about organized crime. The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, and Once Upon a Time in America are just a few of the most notable examples. The genre has proven exceptionally enduring, as audiences continue to be enthralled by the opportunity to look into this dark world.Â
Every so often, a movie will come along that's not specifically about organized crime but does have a subplot in that world. These are interesting cases. Some of them use the subplot well, adding extra flavor to the drama or providing a catalyst for something important to happen. Other times, the mob subplot is awkwardly shoved in because the screenwriters can't think of anything more original to get their characters from point A to point B. Here is a group of movies you might easily forget bring the mob into play. In each case, it's there, but it's probably not the first - or even the second - thing you think about when the film springs to mind.
Which of these movies with an organized crime subplot make the best use of the mob? Vote up your favorites.
Fast cars and gorgeous Tokyo locations are the selling points of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. This third entry in the Fast Saga moves away from the States - and the characters from the original - to head to Japan. There, a young American named Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) falls into the world of "drifting." This special kind of racing involves maneuvering the car around corners in a way that's as precise as it is dangerous. Eventually, Sean becomes proficient enough that he takes on the local racing champion, and promptly loses.
That champion is Takashi, a guy whose uncle is the head of the yakuza. Sean's drifting instructor, Han (Sung Kang), has been stealing money from Takashi, which leads to even more drama, and eventually Han's demise. (Justice for Han!) Of course, Sean and Takashi race again at the movie's end, this time with Sean triumphing. Tokyo Drift was the lowest-grossing installment in the series, partially because stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker were not the main characters, but also likely because the yakuza subplot took time away from the ultra-cool racing.
Houseguest is one of many comedies that use the mob as a means of setting up their central gimmick. In this case, they're after Kevin Franklin (Sinbad), a Pittsburgh con man who owes them $50,000. He obviously needs a place to hide. Opportunity knocks when he stumbles across Gary Young (Phil Hartman), a lawyer waiting at the airport for an old friend he hasn't seen in 25 years. Kevin pretends to be the friend, then, as the title implies, becomes a guest in Gary's home. There, he ends up playing therapist, helping each member of the family figure out some kind of personal crisis.
What Houseguest really wants to do is create an odd-couple dynamic between the fast-talking Kevin and the more reserved Gary - or, as Gene Siskel hilariously put it at the time, to have Kevin bring "a little soul to a suburb full of hopelessly stiff white people." While that's happening, the mobsters continue to chase after Kevin, nearly nabbing him during a marathon. The movie wraps the story up with him giving the mobsters a lottery ticket that's potentially worth a million bucks in exchange for having his debt forgiven. They end up winning $5,000 - much less than they were owed.
Widely and rightly considered one of the best films of the 1980s, Raging Bull stars Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta, the famous middleweight boxer. The movie looks at his career, but also his troubled life outside the ring, which was marked by jealousy and rage. Part of the movie's brilliance is in the way it shows how LaMotta channeled his demons into his fighting, to the point where pummeling someone else became its own form of therapy.
This being a Martin Scorsese picture, the mob figures into the plot. Nicholas Colasanto plays Tommy Como, a local mob boss who offers Jake a shot at the championship title, provided he takes a dive in an upcoming fight first. Jakes takes him up on that offer, then screws it up by doing so little in the ring that it tips off the boxing officials. It's one of many incidents in Raging Bull that get to the heart of LaMotta's stubbornly self-destructive decision-making and inability to think through the potential repercussions of his actions.
Spike Lee's 25th Hour is considered to be one of the definitive movies about or related to 9/11. Edward Norton plays Monty Brogan. He's a convicted drug dealer about to go to prison for seven years. His remaining 24 hours as a free man, which occur not long after the WTC attack, are spent reevaluating his life choices, hanging out with his buddies, and helping his girlfriend adjust to the idea of his upcoming absence.
With all that going on, it's easy to overlook the fact that Monty was dealing for a Russian mobster named Uncle Nikolai. After getting caught, he was given the chance to turn state's evidence, but he declined to rat on the man he worked for. Later in the picture, Nikolai gives Monty advice on how to survive behind bars, and even offers him an opportunity to get fatal revenge against the person who ratted him out in the first place. He declines that, too. Despite having been heavily involved in the criminal underworld, Monty still lives by a moral code.
Phil Alden Robinson's excellent 1992 thriller Sneakers casts Robert Redford as Martin Bishop, a former computer hacker who now runs a business that tests companies' security systems for vulnerabilities. When two NSA agents approach him with a request to swipe a new code-cracking "black box" device, he assembles his team and gets to work. Doing so brings him face-to-face with former hacking partner Cosmo (Ben Kingsley), who now wants to get his hands on that box so he can destabilize the economy. What follows is a race to procure it, which involves Bishop and friends pulling out every stop to fool Cosmo.
A side detail in Sneakers is that Cosmo nurtured connections to organized crime figures while in prison, eventually becoming a money launderer for them. Now free from jail, he's running his own criminal organization, and getting hold of the black box is key to accomplishing his goals. The general concept is that Cosmo and Bishop both started off on a slightly illicit path. Bishop eventually went over to the side of the good, while Cosmo went further and further down the path of crime. As characters, they are mirror opposites.
GoldenEye has all the things fans have come to expect from a James Bond adventure - cool gadgets, awesome cars, beautiful women with names that are double entendres, and so on. This time around, he's trying to prevent yet another megalomaniacal villain from misusing a space-based weapon. It's the classic 007 structure, with Pierce Brosnan making a striking debut as the beloved secret agent.
The link to the mob here comes in the form of Valentin Zukovsky, played by Robbie Coltrane. He's a former KGB agent who went on to become the head of the Russian mafia. In GoldenEye, Bond turns to him for help in connecting with the Janus crime syndicate. The men have a past together - Bond once shot him in the knee - but they do form a truce. Zukovsky makes the introduction, allowing Bond to get close to the people he's pursuing. The mob connection is a small detail in the movie, but one that does help set the plot in motion.
