Review: "The Godfather Part III" is bad, and Coppola's tinkering has made it worse

Movie of the Week #9 is a film that's even worse than you remember

Welcome to Movie of the Week, a Wednesday column where we take a look back at a classic, obscure, or otherwise interesting movie each and every week for paid subscribers. Follow this link for more details on everything you get subscribing to Fade to Lack!

The Godfather Part III is a terrible movie – not just by the standards of the Godfather films that preceded it, but by any metric – and Francis Ford Coppola’s subsequent tinkering has only made it worse.

The film that arrived in theaters in 1990 is a mess. Its plot is needlessly convoluted and poor at communicating its own narrative or stakes, and the structure and pace have none of the elegance of the first film, let alone the mastery of the second. The original cut is shorter than either of the 1970s films, but feels far longer. Having only three returning actors from the earlier movies – Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, and Talia Shire – really hurts the sense this is a continuing story, with the absence of Robert Duvall in particular felt powerfully. Two of those three act fundamentally out of character; the idea that Connie (Shire) doesn’t believe Michael killed Fredo – or, at least, chooses not to acknowledge it, and has instead stuck close to Michael ever since – is a deeply bizarre character choice given Connie was the member of the Corleone family who saw clearest through Michael’s exterior to the monster underneath. And that has nothing on the character assassination of Kay (Keaton), a woman who was so clear eyed about Michael’s evil that she aborted his baby rather than bring more of him into the world, here reduced to a hopeless nostalgic tearfully admitting “I’ll always love you.”