YMMV / Gangster Squad

• Complete Monster: Mickey Cohen is an utterly psychotic mobster whose brutality terrifies even other hardened mobsters. Cohen opens by having a friendly emissary from the Chicago mob executed by being torn apart between two trucks, before throwing a group who are late in their protection money in their building, locking them inside and burning them with the building. A building he'd had women brought to in order to be hooked on drugs and turned out as prostitutes. He furiously executes an underling with a power drill due to the man failing him and when his girlfriend opts to leave him, Cohen sends one of his men to throw acid in her face.
• Genius Bonus: Mickey refers to Grace as Claude Rains when she starts to suddenly be gone for long periods of time, due to being with Wooters.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The scene in the trailer where gangsters fire upon people in a movie theater while emerging from the screen became this after the 2012 Aurora theater shooting. This even prompted a reshoot for the film and pushing its release date back several months.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Thanos recruits Falcon and Luis instead of making them disappear with a single fingersnap.
  • This will not be the last time Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone would fall in love in the City of Angels but this time with songs around instead of being between bullets and violence.
  • Josh Brolin and Sean Penn being antagonistic in nature and based in a real life event again as in Milk; but with their roles reversed (Brolin as the hero and Penn as the villain), set in another well known Californian city and one ending in a tragic shooting and the other in a spectacular No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Even with the reshot scenes, the film as whole was deemed to be so violent that it was still hard to forget the parallel with Aurora.

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