Most critics admire it, and the admiration clusters in the same places: the scale of the thing, the four-decade flashback structure, Ennio Morricone’s score and the care of the period reconstruction. Robert De Niro and James Woods are singled out repeatedly. Several reviews make the same distinction, that the film barely works as a gangster picture and succeeds instead as an elegy about a man broken by time, with recurring images doing the work the plot does not.
The reservations are consistent too. The plotting is called arbitrary or shaky, the central characters thuggish and hard to care about, and the quieter scenes over-choreographed. The spread is wide, and it splits by date: the two negative notices, from Variety and The New York Times, come from the original release and find the film sprawling and unfocused, while later critics writing about the full-length version, Ebert and Kael among them, argue that the shortened American cut did the damage.