Gangs Of New York (18)

Violent gangland epic, historical panorama, costume romance – Gangs of New York wants to be something for everyone, and you can sense its effort to please in almost every frame. It has been a personal project of its director, Martin Scorsese, ever since he read Herbert Asbury's 1928 book The Gangs of New York more than 30 years ago, so praise is due at least to his perseverance in finally getting the thing on screen.

You can't help feeling, though, that somewhere along the way Scorsese lost sight of what so impassioned him in the first place; that all the uncertainty over finance, all the dickering with Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein, and a certain crisis of confidence in the director himself have fatally disjointed its shape and stalled its momentum. It's not a disaster, but it's an awfully long way from the career masterpiece – the Scorsese version of Once Upon a Time in America – some of us had been hoping and indeed praying for.

What makes it all the more frustrating is that one can discern in it the lineaments of something really interesting. The era it investigates – the teeming and vicious New York netherworld of 1862-63 – is one I'd never seen in movies before. Prior to the ton of media publicity the film attracted I knew very little about the Five Points area or the multifarious gangs – the Forty Thieves, the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys et al – that fought savage street battles for possession of it, and the prospect of Scorsese as chronicler of these 19th-century BadFellas looked irresistible.

The first hour of the picture actually bears out some of this promise, starting with the look of Dante Ferretti's startling production design (cavernously gloomy interiors, cobblestones and truffling pigs on the streets) and leading on to an exorbitantly bloody street rumble in the winter of 1846 between the American Nativists led by William Cutting, aka Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) and a gang of Irish immigrants led by Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson). Men, great brawny brutes, flail at each other with knives, axes, hatchets and clubs, and gradually the snowy ground starts to look like a raspberry ripple.

The fighting comes to a climax when Bill slays Vallon in full view of the latter's son. Dispatched to a house of correction, the kid, called Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio), returns incognito to the 'hood 16 years later and insinuates himself into Bill's gang. An Oedipal struggle is entrained: Amsterdam secretly purposes to kill Bill, but instead finds himself succumbing to the man's raffish charms and quasi-paternal affection. Both raised in orphan asylums, they seem to need one another, and being "under the wing of the dragon", as Amsterdam says, "it's warmer than you think". In one scene Bill, using a pig's carcass for practice, shows the kid how to inflict a lethal stab wound, in a way that another father might teach his son how to play blackjack or build a treehouse. It's what Bill regards as a rite of passage. He doesn't even mind when the kid falls for his mistress Jenny (Cameron Diaz), a flame-haired cutpurse and housebreaker.

The problem here begins once you notice how one-sided the picture's dramatic energy is. All the sparks, like a knife on a grinder, fly from Daniel Day-Lewis's toweringly satanic Bill, who, with his handlebar moustache, stovepipe hat and plaid breeches looks a near-parody of Victorian villainy and acts with the calculated brutality of a true killer. Bill is a bad seed, yet he's riven with entirely human contradictions. He hates the Irish immigrants, but fondly calls Amsterdam "another bastard son of Erin I took into my embrace". He thinks himself a patriot, yet spills more American blood than any British soldier his father died fighting. "I'm New York," he tells Amsterdam, and in his long-legged swagger and piercing glare we feel the pure enjoyment of tyranny, of the dread he inspires all over these mean streets. Method man Day-Lewis reportedly kept his intensity at full blast by listening to Eminem, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that he drank nothing but snake's blood on set and howled at the moon. It's a great transfixing performance, never more so than when he explains, in a long monologue, how he got his glass eye (a tiny eagle at its centre) and then taps it with the point of his knife. Eek.

Unfortunately, nothing else thrives in Day-Lewis's shadow. DiCaprio, the sop to a younger audience, is too callow to impose himself, and his romance with Diaz is a non-starter. The scene in which they show each other their scars – two hard nuts together – does not convince in the slightest, and one detects the studio's fingerprints all over it. One or two of the smaller roles flare briefly to life (Brendan Gleeson as a club-wielding scrapper, Jim Broadbent as the corrupt Boss Tweed) but they fade as the picture attempts to broaden its historical canvas and address wider issues of class, politics and race. Then it just becomes confusing. The confrontation between the Irish and Bill's American Nativists, the movie's climactic Götterdämmerung, is somehow hijacked by the 1863 Draft Riots, when the army fired upon civilians, blacks were lynched from lampposts and the city went up in flames. Two set pieces get crunched into one, and while it is chaotic and feral in the patented Scorsese style, I couldn't really say what this bit of history has to do with the gangs or their turf war.

The film might have survived this weak structuring if the personal drama had forged some vivid connection between the characters, but the story, scripted by Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian and Kenneth Lonergan, hasn't the imaginative resonance to pull us through. With one noted exception, there is nothing in this chronicle of murder, revenge and redemption we haven't seen done more compellingly in previous movies, some of them by Martin Scorsese. See it for yourself; it is, after all, the latest from a great director. But I think it's very far from a director on great form.