Review – The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

I originally saw this as The Godfather Part III when it first came out, but apparently it was so long ago that I don’t have a review for it. So this new re-edit by master re-editor Francis Ford Coppola gave me a good excuse to re-watch and share my thoughts. This is by far the dumbest, sappiest episode of the trilogy, a pale shadow of its predecessors. Sure, you get a little of the high-level intrigue that helped make the second one such a masterpiece, but even here it’s mostly financial wheeling and dealing rather than all the cool Cuba conspiracy stuff. In any event, even a better batch of mob doings wouldn’t justify the intolerable wallow in the Michael-Corleone-gettin’-old crap. And that’s not even the worst part of the film; that distinction belongs to the icky love affair between the protagonist’s daughter (played by the director’s daughter, who is much more talented behind the camera than she is in front of it) and her first cousin (fortunately played by Andy Garcia rather than Nicolas Cage). Minor spoiler: it’s funny that the new title mentions a death that occurred on screen in the original edit but doesn’t happen at all in the new cut. See if desperate