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" Why is it that the new crop of gangster-themed films and television shows fills me with preemptive disappointment? Perhaps it&amp;#039;s that Shia LaBeouf stars in this week&amp;#039;s bootlegger movie, Lawless. Whenever LaBeouf appears in anything, it signals a state of creative exhaustion. (See: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.) The malaise runs deeper, though. Boardwalk Empire is brilliantly written, brilliantly acted, brilliantly set, brilliantly directed, and yet I can&amp;#039;t bring myself to care. I&amp;#039;ve seen both seasons but cannot remember a single standout scene. When HBO canceled Luck, the jig was up. Warner Brothers recently announced that it was delaying the release of Gangster Squad, from September to January. Purportedly, this extended schedule is to give the producers time to reshoot a scene of gunplay in a theater, which was just too reminiscent of the Aurora tragedy for test audiences to stomach. I have a better idea than rescheduling. Cancellation. The gangster genre is dead. Let it die.  Please don&amp;#039;t misunderstand. I have loved gangster movies and shows my whole life. Being part-Italian, watching The Godfather with my dad and brother was a rite of passage. Goodfellas, to me, is the only perfect film ever shot. (In the middle of writing this, I stopped to watch a scene and ended up seeing the whole movie again. Absolutely perfect.) I&amp;#039;ve seen Donnie Brasco at least two dozen times. And, of course, The Sopranos. I don&amp;#039;t know if it&amp;#039;s the best television show ever made, but it&amp;#039;s near the top, anyway.  But I think The Sopranos ended the genre. In fact, I think I can identify the single scene in The Sopranos that ended the genre. Carmela goes to visit a psychotherapist:      The scene actually happened relatively early, in season three. The rest of the show amounted to the same question, asked of the audience over and over again: Why do you sympathize with these monsters? In the second-to-last episode, Doctor Melfi, as an audience surrogate, decides that Tony is in fact unredeemable, and he has the classic line: &amp;quot;What you&amp;#039;re doing is immoral.&amp;quot; Every great gangster movie has given a different explanation for why we sympathize with the devils. In The Godfather, the gangsters were good family men. In Goodfellas, Henry Hill was funny and self-conscious. In Donnie Brasco, the gangsters were down on their luck. And so on. Our fascination with gangsters has self-consumed. As we wanted to know more about them, we learned more about them. As we learned about them, we discovered that they were filth. In Lawless and Boardwalk Empire, the new gangsters are sympathetic basically because they&amp;#039;re in the past. And, I guess, because they&amp;#039;re poor. Neither is a very satisfying reason for sympathy. We know, from journalism as well as from the movies, that gangsters aren&amp;#039;t worth an iota of sympathy. They are, in reality, murderous scumbag thugs who prey on the weak and vulnerable. It is one of the costs of living in a democracy with the rule of law that the police just can&amp;#039;t take them out back and put a bullet in the back of their heads.  All great genres eventually exhaust themselves. In Renaissance England, the revenge tragedy was all the rage for fifty years, and it gave us Othello and The Duchess of Malfi and Hamlet. But eventually it ran out of juice, too. There were thirty years of retreads, during which playwrights tried to recapture the box office and the intellectual glory of the genre, and while there were some fun plays produced, the attempts overwhelmingly failed. We&amp;#039;re at the end of the failure of gangster movies now. It&amp;#039;s time to find a new genre.  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a15539/gangster-movies-dead-12141762/>