horrible casting

Maybe he doesn't, but it's true. Lucky Luciano was... how shall I put this... well, with no offense meant to the man, rather homely. He had peeling skin, a scarred up face, and his right eye only opened part-way (I believe from one of his scars, but don't quote me on it). Many of his contemporaries, though never to his face, likened him to a lizard.

I agree. I'm watching this movie right now on cable. I started watching it in the middle, and I had assumed from the start that Slater played a detective fighting against Luciano. I was really shocked when I looked on this page and saw that he plays Luciano.

Wasn't Luciano actually from Italy? Slater doesn't look very Italian.

Yeah, with better casting, this movie coulda been epic.

Who cares what the actors' ethnicities were? Unless you are racist, it shouldn't matter. What matters is their personality traits and believability of them playing the actors. And unless you knew Luciano, Lansky, Sigel or Costello you shouldn't speak of the actors' precise portrayal of them. So what, and Irish or Mexican playing a role where the ethnicity is something different...who cares, that is a racist comment if I ever heard one before. Does Robert De Niro look like Al Capone? Not at all...but he did a wonderful acting job in The Untouchables so who cares if he looks like him or not? Does Jamie Foxx look like Ray Charles? Not really (there are probably hundreds of more examples)... If the casting in biographical films was done completely by selecting actors who most resembeled the real life persons involved, we would be watching films with sub-par to horrible acting 75% of the time and you'd have wished that they took actors who looked nothing like the character they are playing.

Wait so what are u saying that A black man should have played Lucky Luciano? I'm not racist but it does matter. Christian Slatter was horrible! Patrick Dempsey wasn't that bad because he was alright as Meyer Lansky (the smart jew who never spent a day in prison) but someone should have told him to watch Hymon Roth (in The Godfather Part3). But whatever. Bad acting from most of the cast. Bad directing but "GOOD SCREENPLAY".

schmitzova,

I started watching this movie on cable, but apparently came in after F. Murray Abraham's character was out of the picture so to speak. That's too bad, because I'm a big fan.
True, F. Murray Abraham is half Syrian, half Italian. However, the overwhelming majority of the characters that he's played on TV and in film have been Jewish.
I remember seeing an interview with him once where he was talking about his life growing up, and that people always assumed that he was Jewish. They would make unkind jokes about Arabs to him, due to the conflict between Israel and the Arab nations surrounding it. He would tell them, "Actually, my Dad is Arab." They'd appologize, and start making Anti-Semtic jokes instead, and he'd have to say, "No, I don't really think that's funny either. Alot of my friends & neighbors are Jewish." He said that incidents like that gave him a great deal of insight into human nature.

you might not find actors that actually look the part, but it might be nice to find some that can ACT the part. I just saw this laughable movie last night. It looked like a bunch of young, bad actors, trying their best to imitate DiNero and Pacino. It had the campy feel of gangster flick produced by Lifetime Television. This movie sucks.