Though the film arrived a year after Brian De Palma’s “Scarface”, it’s neck-deep in references to Cagney-era wiseguy business, to the quaint extent that it often feels like an extended “Carol Burnett Show” sketch. Or maybe they just respected Amy Heckerling’s perennially underrated “Johnny Dangerously” that much. Perhaps this tidiness scared our great film parodists from tackling the genre during their prime (Jim Abrahams was well off the top of his game when he made “Jane Austen’s Mafia!”). Of all the classic Hollywood genres, gangster films have the simplest formula: a smart poor kid sees an express lane to riches via a life of crime, becomes king of the hill, then topples all the way down to his death.
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