YMMV / The Irishman

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• Award Snub: Much like with Scorsese's Gangs of New York, this film got nominated for ten Academy Award honors, none of which it won. Robert De Niro wasn't nominated in any category, and there's speculation that Joe Pesci and Al Pacino both being up for Best Supporting Actor caused the votes to be split between them, allowing Brad Pitt to get the win instead.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Horrendously insensitive jokes are made about Joe Kennedy Sr. having a stroke as being effectively dead. Becomes ironic, however, when Russ, who made the jokes, is revealed to have had a stroke later in life.
• Dancing Bear: The pre-release publicity made a big deal out of the Digital De-Aging effects.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Salvatore "Sally Bugs" Briguglio, Frank's bespectacled fellow hitman who humorously picks apart Chuckie O'Brien's dodgy story about transporting fish and whose gigantic Coke bottle glasses make him look goofy even as he brutally strangles people to death.
• Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: There are many reviews and analyses focused on this film's use of tracking shots, drawing parallels with tracking shots used in Goodfellas and what sort of symbolism Martin Scorsese might have been creating. Scorsese, in a DGA interview, said that this film's tracking shot is simply a way of establishing the setting.
• Fight Scene Failure: While the scene where Frank confronts a shopkeeper for shoving his daughter is well-acted and intense, the No-Holds-Barred Beatdown at the end of the scene looks unintentionally comical. Robert De Niro is much older than Frank is supposed to be at this time, and a younger body double was not used to make the beating look more convincing ^note Despite the fact that the scene is entirely shot from a distance and a body double would have been easier to conceal, so his movements are too stiff and weak for the attack to hurt as much as the shopkeeper's agonised yells would indicate. In addition, combined with Special Effects Failure, the glass on the shop door is clearly supposed to break due to Frank throwing the shopkeeper into it, but in practice the actor crawls up to the door on his own and the glass falls apart as he touches the handle.
• Friendly Fandoms: With fans of Breaking Bad, due to having plots involving organized crime and corruption as well as the shared presence of Jesse Plemons. The fact that El Camino was released a month before The Irishman certainly helps.
• Gratuitous Special Effects: The film makes heavy use of Digital De Aging by none other than Industrial Light & Magic to make Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci realistically change over the course of the decades the movie takes place in. The heavy demands that Martin Scorsese placed on ILM forced them to use special infrared cameras that prompted even more CGI used for rather trivial matters (such as digitally adding car windshields and cigarette smoke).
• Just Here for Godzilla: Some people watch this film because it has Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino as part of the cast.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Following Martin Scorsese's controversial dismissal of modern superhero films, particularly those from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it became popular leading up to the film's release to joke that the film was actually about a superhero named Irish Man.
  • "The way Scorsese intended."^Explanation After a controversial Twitter post which recommended that viewers watch the film episodically, other posters began making fun of film snobs by conceiving of increasingly ridiculous ways to watch the film, including on a cracked phone screen, on a Wii U, on a Nintendo DS, on a Texas Instruments calculator, split up into hundreds of 15-second chunks on Instagram Stories, on a camcorder video of someone else's TV, and on a smartphone mounted on the dashboard while driving down the highway. Similar jokes were made at the expense of David Lynch after he criticized the idea of watching films "on a fucking telephone" in an interview.
• Moral Event Horizon: If Tony Pro didn't cross it for having Three Fingers murdered and mutilated for coming up big in the union, he definitely crossed it when he threatens to murder Jimmy Hoffa's granddaughter to his face.
• Narm: The aforementioned scene listed under Fight Scene Failure. While clearly intended to invoke the hilariously over-the-top beatdowns seen in some of Scorsese's older films, due to being performed by a much older actor, the beating shown here is hilarious for all the wrong reasons.
• Nightmare Fuel: Tony Pro, who is basically Tommy DeVito 2.0., and far more violent. To clarify, the man is a brutal New Jersey capo with a disturbing taste for violence and mutilation. He's a reminder of how brutal some mobsters were during the heyday of The Mafia.
  • The way he threatens Hoffa in his face.
    Tony Pro to Jimmy Hoffa: I'll apologize for being late after I kidnap your granddaughter, rip her guts out, and send them to you in a FUCKING ENVELOPE!
• One-Scene Wonder: Quite a few actually. Scorcese does a brilliant job in this film of getting great performances from many small roles. Here are some notable examples:
  • Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel in the only scene he has lines) grilling Frank about the attempted bombing of his industrial laundry service.
  • Whispers Detullio (Paul Herman) putting Frank up to the bombing in the first place.
  • And fans of The Sopranos will certainly get a chuckle out of seeing Silvio Dante himself (Steve Van Zandt) crooning on stage as Jerry Vale.
• Padding
  • A good amount of time is dedicated to Sally Bugs bugging Chuckie about the spilled fish water in the backseat of the car they're in and the resulting stink. This doesn't lead to anything important and defuses the tension of Frank having to kill Hoffa. However, it's symbolic of Frank's current situation. In Chuckie's story, everything has been prepared for him, and he doesn't need to know all of the details. Likewise, Frank is just part of a machine, not needing to know all of the details and never in control of his own fate.
  • The subplot about Crazy Joe Gallo and Frank's role in killing him. Though an effective scene that dramatizes an important event in Mob history, Gallo's death only loosely ties into the main plot and mostly serves to show what Frank and Russell were doing while Hoffa was in prison.
• Paranoia Fuel: While Hoffa and Fitz are in the middle of an increasingly violent feud, Jo is about to start her car when she realizes it might blow up, and takes several seconds to work up the willpower to turn the key. Followed by a split-second shot of a different car blowing up in an earlier scene, before it turns out fine.
• Special Effect Failure: The de-aging technology used for the film did have its limits. The flashbacks to Frank's World War II service have Sheeran in his mid-20s, but in the scene of him executing the two German soldiers he looks more like he's in his early 40's or maybe late 30s at best. Compare to how Robert De Niro looked in Mean Streets or The Godfather Part II, which were filmed when he was in his late 20s. Even when the character's are older and the de-aging is less of a stretch, nothing could be done about the fact that they still move like old men.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The ending. Dear GOD, the ending. Sheeran's friends are all dead either due to their Mafia lifestyles or just getting old, his own family doesn't want to talk to him anymore, he can barely walk and he has to pick out his own funeral arrangements because no one else will. The final shot, in particular, is a gut punch as he doesn't talk much with the priest and is waiting on death's door. He asks the priest to leave the door open slightly, as he doesn't want to feel completely shut off from the world as he does now. Scorsese is no stranger to a Downer Ending, but this one takes the cake.
    • The tearjerker of that final scene is taken up to eleven if you do a little homework. When the priest (who is pretty much the last person Sheeran has left to talk to) is leaving, he tells Frank he'll see him "after the holidays." Frank replies that he isn't going anywhere. In reality, Frank died on December 14th. So he never saw that priest again. Scorsese did do his homework.
  • Both scenes where Russell tries to strike a relationship with Peggy. The first one is bad enough, when she rebuffs him after his attempt of bonding with her with a silly joke and an offer of candy, immediately after lamenting that he can't have children. The second is absolutely painful when she refuses to thank him for Christmas gifts. Despite being an amoral criminal throughout the film, you really can't help but feel bad for the guy in these scenes.
  • Also, the scene where Frank is talking to his other daughter about how he wants to reconnect with Peggy but she won't talk to him. She tearfully tells him that none of them could ever come to him with their problems because they were terrified of how he would respond. It's clear growing up with Frank, knowing but never acknowledging what he did for a living, meant spending most of their time walking on eggs.
  • Frank's many conversations with Hoffa following the latter's release from prison become more and more tragic as it becomes clear that Hoffa is going to be wacked. Their final conversation before the deed is done has Frank begging Jimmy to back down and understand how serious the situation has become. Hoffa doesn't, fully confident that mafia wouldn't have the stones to do it. He's wrong.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Quite a few critics were confused at why an actress of Anna Paquin's caliber would be hired to play a character who speaks a grand total of seven words. Paquin herself was quick to shut this down, saying she leaped at the chance to work with the legendary Martin Scorsese no matter how small the part was. It has also been pointed out how her lack of talking is very crucial to the character's resentment towards Frank and her one line plays to the overall final fallout with her father.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The De-Aging effects, while some found it either a bit weird or taking some time to get use to, are largely impressive as a whole for its three leads, especially considering the limitations that Scorsese placed on the visual effects teams.^Note  Normally the type of effects used would be done using the actors with specific markers either drawn or attached to their faces, in order for the artists to apply the effect accurately by tracking the markers in 3D space. Scorcese didn't want to lose the drama of the scenes with having his star actors covered in polka dots, so the VFX team figured out ways to track the actors' faces and expressions completely marker free using infrared tracking.

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