It’s the best mob movie ever made because it’s also one of the best “hangout” movies ever made. It’s your classic gangster downward spiral tale where lowlifes live the high life and eventually see it all come tumbling down, but anyone who’s watched it fifty times—there are plenty of us out there—does so because hanging out with these characters is so much fun. Fans of this film feel like they’ve played cards with Robert De Niro, exchanged wisecracks with Joe Pesci and beat up a guy who’s late on his protection payments with Ray Liotta. We’ve eaten spaghetti and meatballs with them, saw Johnny Mathis at The Copacabana with them and whiffed their cigarette smoke. Even its music score—dozens of old records that run the gamut from Vito and The Salutations to Donovan to the Rolling Stones—sounds like the background music of a party while it often provides ironic commentary on the action. It’s a fast-paced tornado of entertainment, but is also so full of detail that when it’s over, you feel like you just finished a 500-page novel. Director Martin Scorsese hits comedic notes, tragic notes, romantic notes and harsh, violent notes with perfect pitch. Every time it looks like fun to be a gangster, it’s not long before Scorsese shows the dark side, too. Characters we like die suddenly and brutally. Minor arguments end in gunfire. Longtime friends try to kill each other. Family turns fatal and good times turn into desperate times.
Based on the true story of Henry Hill, an entrenched New York mobster who eventually turned informant and went into the Witness Protection Program, as originally told by Nicholas Pileggi (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese) in his book Wiseguy.