The Untouchables

When it comes to gangster movies, everyone rightly froths at the mouth over The Godfather and Goodfellas. But what about The Untouchables? True, it's not as iconic and layered as the former or perhaps as audience-friendly cool as the latter, but for sheer satisfaction, Brian De Palma's tour-de-force is hard to beat.

Set in 1930, Chicago, at the height of prohibition, vicious crime boss Al Capone (Robert De Niro) rules the corrupt city while making a fortune out of illegal booze. Hell-bent on taking him down, idealistic Treasury Agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) puts together a small, hand-picked team who can't be corrupted, bought or got to.

One of the many reasons for the film's success, is that it's a straightforward good guys vs bad yarn. While Coppola's operatic epic is about Italian family mafiosi and Marty's classic focuses on brutal hoods, here we're rooting for the coppers. This means this is in many ways a simpler movie not concerned with moral shades of grey (our heroes are virtuous, the villains boo-hissable), but importantly, it's not a dumb one, with De Palma offering complexity via Ness' struggle to enforce the law by breaking it.

Ah yes, but did these events actually happen? Well, despite having the last surviving real-life Untouchable Albert H Wolff as an advisor, De Palma chose to loosely (key word) adapt the Fifties TV series instead of going for facts. But so what? From the minute we open with a from-the-ceiling viewpoint of Capone getting a towel shave, this is a stylishly-engrossing affair. There's plenty of memorable scenes, but undoubtedly the highlight is the now-famous Union Station set-piece, where the screen almost bursts with tension as a baby's pram periously bounces down the steps, Battleship Potemkin-style in among a crucial shootout. Magnificent.

And it helps that both the score and writing are top-notch. Although Ennio Morricone's music has brief flickers of retro-naff, most of the time its either soaringly upliftingly or hiking up the suspense. Meanwhile, David Mamet's salty dialogue gifts plenty of quotable lines - such as when Connery's hard-bitten mentor explains to get Capone (all together now): "They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way."

Speaking of Sir Sean, he's on top form here, 100 per cent worth the Oscar in his most magnetic and enjoyable role this side of Indiana Jones' dad Henry. You could moan that he all but ignores his character's Irish accent, but when your brogue is this cool ("Nessssh, Nesssssssh!") why bother?

With De Niro also on attention-grabbing form as the larger-than-life Alfonso (up to his method tricks as always; putting on weight, using Capone's tailors), Costner has a hard time standing out in his breakthrough - yet that's what is needed. What is, is a righteous, all-American hero and - like always - he's up to that challenge.