
Ness' team of four comes together quickly. However, instead of causing him to turn tail, it stiffens his resolve.

One of Ness' early liquor raids is a failure, and it turns him into a front-page laughingstock. He may not agree with prohibition, but, as long as that's the way the law is written, he will defend it, and that means getting Capone (Robert De Niro) off the streets. Ness is a straight-shooter who believes that the law, whether good or bad, is paramount.
#GANGLAND MOVIE 1987 FULL#
Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) has just been assigned the Capone case and has arrived at his office in the Chicago Police Department full of righteous indignation and grand aspirations. And, in a sense, that's what makes it such a satisfying motion picture experience. The Untouchables is the stuff of myth and legend, not reality. Most of the events surrounding Ness' triumph over Capone, however, are highly fictionalized, if not completely made-up. One of the men to bring down Capone (who ended up going to jail on an income tax evasion charge) was Treasury Agent Eliot Ness. The facts forming the bare-bones skeleton of the story are rooted in what happed in Chicago during prohibition, when Al Capone was the meanest and most powerful of the ganglords. This movie (loosely inspired by the TV series, which, in turn, was broadly influenced by historical facts) may not have much thematic depth, but it represents two hours of pure, exuberant entertainment – an epic gangster tale rendered on a grand scale.

For Brian De Palma, known best for his stylish crafting of Hitchcock-influenced plots, The Untouchables represents not only a departure from the norm, but an unqualified triumph. The Untouchables is a tour de force, the pinnacle of a career.
