The Godfather Trilogy Comes To An Underwhelming End With The Godfather: Part III

And so, we come to the end of The Godfather trilogy, a saga of films adapting the literary work by Mario Puzo of the same name. Following his tenure helming the lasts two entries in this series, Francis Ford Coppola returns to the directors chair for this final chapter in the Corleone saga, though considering how starved Paramount Pictures is for content these days, I'm preparing myself for an inevitable McG directed reboot of The Godfather to get announced anyday now. For now though, The Godfather: Part III serves as the definitive end of one of the most acclaimed franchises in cinematic history, though this third chapter received initial responses that proved to be far more critical than its predecessors.


It is now 1979, years after The Godfather: Part II has ended. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is now a widely praised individual with massive amounts of power. In the intervening years since the last movie, the dude's gone mostly legitimate, leaving the world of mobsters behind in favor of more upstanding business practices, though Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna) maintains tight control over the criminal part of the Corleone family enterprise. During a classy banquet, Michael Corleone's nephew, Vincent Corleone (Andy Garcia), makes it clear that he's got more than a few bones to pick with Zasa and believes he should be taken out due to the way he disrespects Michael Corleone.

Corleone is conflicted about the prospect of ordering that kind of hit, but Vincent takes it on himself to do just that once Michael goes into a diabetes-induced coma shortly after a number of Corleone's associates are killed in attack Vincent attributes to Zasa. This conflict, as well as some shady business dealings going down at the Vatican as Corleone tries to do business with individuals working at such an influential religious location, brings Michael Corleone directly into the middle of the mobster life he's been trying to leave behind. As Corleone himself says, "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in!"

If the first two Godfather movies felt natural extensions of each other that constantly expanded the world the Corleone characters inhabited as it progressed, The Godfather: Part III feels like a needless addition to a saga with meandering plot lines and uninteresting new characters that don't add much of anything to the world of Michael Corleone. I do feel like a lot of that comes down to a number of missing characters from past installments, especially Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen (Duvall declined to return due to a salary dispute), that actors work as that particular character was already exemplary just look at the first two movies but man, you really do appreciate all that be brought to these stories when he's not around.

The lack of certain really potent characters from the first two movies (who either died in prior installments or their actors refused to come back) likely wouldn't be felt that much if the various newbie players in the Corleone saga were interesting in their own right. Instead, we're stuck with tedious primary new main characters like Vincent Corleone, a one-dimensional guy who garners surprisingly little depth as the story goes, and the daughter of Michael Corleone, Mary Corleone, played by Sofia Coppola in a stiff performance that delivers some truly terrible line deliveries that take ya right out of the movie.

Though his directing here is nowhere near the level of the first two Godfather movies, at least Francis Ford Coppola's strengths as a filmmaker keep The Godfather: Part III from being truly disposable as he gets good performances out of returning actors like Diane Keaton and especially Al Pacino while a crucial execution scene is well-staged and there are some examples of striking imagery to speak of. Plus, the final scene of the entire movie feels like the perfect somber capper to this trilogy, an appropriately dark conclusion to Michael Corleone's life. It's just a pity that to get there you have to wade through a largely forgettable movie like The Godfather: Part III.