'Godfather Coda' review: A famously disappointing sequel embraces the dying fall

It’s a little better now.

In “The Godfather Part III,” recut and retitled “The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone,” the flashes of greatness periodically illuminate the general, frustrating fog of not-badness. Never was there a sequel so unlucky in following such singular predecessors. And rarely has a director tested the limits of reshaping his own material across multiple versions.

The third “Godfather” movie never had a reason for existence beyond its financial one. The 1990 film reteamed director Francis Coppola with his co-writer, Mario Puzo, whose pulp bestseller “The Godfather” got the whole thing going in 1969. Written by Coppola and Puzo in a collective sweat, in between losing bouts at the casino tables in Reno, Nev., the “Godfather III” dialogue keeps coming back to money worries, debts and obligations. It’s strictly business, not personal, following the old Corleone ethos. The storyline fixates on the cost of regaining an image of legitimacy, both Michael Corleone’s and Francis Coppola’s.

After a string of disappointments, Coppola accepted Paramount Pictures’ unrefusable offer to create a sequel to “The Godfather” (1972) and “The Godfather Part II” (1974), critical and popular smashes as well as top Oscar winners. The second film, especially, is a stunner — a tough-minded, grandly expansive portrait of American corruption. Rewatch those earlier films in relation to Coppola’s somewhat revised third film, now in theaters (where allowed) and streaming Tuesday, and you’ll experience confident, big-budget studio filmmaking as it was possible nearly a half-century ago.

At the end of “Godfather II,” his marriage ruined and having just ordered his brother’s murder, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone transforms fully into a sinister hollow man. The ending was chilling and perfect. And that’s why the somewhat altered “Godfather Coda” can’t fix what’s wrong at the story’s center: Turning Michael into a softer, more sympathetic tragic figure feels like a cop-out — a deal made with the feds, or at least the studio heads.

There were always things to like about “Godfather III,” starting with Andy Garcia. In one of many lifts from Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Garcia plays the illegitimate outsider Vincent Mancini, eagle-eyed hothead among the new “Godfather” characters. He’s all nerve and no patience, and Garcia’s wonderful in the role. At one point in “Godfather Coda,” in the Atlantic City scene prior to the movie’s least effective bloodbath, Garcia tilts his head and catches Michael’s eye, and you’d swear it was Robert De Niro or James Caan making a guest appearance. The movie’s worth seeing just for the way Garcia smiles and says “Zasa!” as he takes care of the greedy mob thug played by Joe Mantegna another standout.

Coppola’s revisions begin at the beginning. Instead of the wordless glide through the now-empty Corleone home on Lake Tahoe, full of bloody memories of misdeeds past, “Godfather Coda” starts with Michael negotiating with the desperate Vatican banker played by Donal Donnelly. We no longer spend any time at the Catholic ceremony honoring Michael for his quasi-legitimate charitable work.

The new version shaves about five minutes from the original “Godfather III” running time of 2 hours, 42 minutes. Some changes are tiny; the murder-by-eyeglasses shot, late in the action, is perhaps two seconds longer and 40 times bloodier than the one used in the original. The ending is substantially new. The 1990 version ended with a montage of Michael, near death and recalling better times with his ill-fated daughter, Mary (Sofia Coppola, the director’s daughter), his ill-fated first wife Apollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli) and his second, remarried wife, Kay (Diane Keaton, perpetually stronger than her material). This is followed by a fade-out in the Sicilian sun. Coppola has refashioned the coda in “Godfather Coda” to focus on memories of Michael and his daughter only, followed by a death more obliquely suggested than realistically rendered.

The tweaks are interesting, even if they can’t do anything about larger narrative frustrations. The Vatican/Mafioso entanglements remain murky and a little flat. Too many of the new characters are pretty pale, as written and acted, compared to their rough equivalents from the first two “Godfather” pictures. George Hamilton, in other words, as Michael’s legal eagle, is no Robert Duvall; he’s essentially a zero-gravitas science experiment. The much-maligned performance of Sofia Coppola — often touchingly unaffected as Mary, in love with her first cousin, Vincent — remains a diffident element in a movie rife with mixed blessings. (She was always a director, not an actress, in the making.)

In the introductory video to the recut “Godfather Coda,” director Coppola talks about what it meant to him to restore the original screenplay’s title, in order to ramp down expectations for a conventional sequel. The title’s a nice change. But what’s missing here is the sheer visual beauty of the first two “Godfather” films. With his crack team of production designers, and with the brilliantly daring, shadow-hungry cinematographer Gordon Willis (who shot all three movies), Coppola clearly relished the opportunity to recreate vanished eras on lavish budgets. He created fantastic illusions of 1940s New York in the first “Godfather,” and of 1917 New York in the second, along with Havana, Lake Tahoe and Sicily. “The Godfather Coda” settles, proficiently but without magic, for a less alluring era: New York circa 1979-1980, along with location filming in Rome and, once again, in Sicily.

It was probably too much to ask: “The Godfather Coda” is nothing like the recent Coppola redux with “The Cotton Club” (1984), now known as “The Cotton Club Encore.” That’s a significantly changed and improved movie now, however flawed on the story level and in spite of some of the casting. The recut “Cotton Club” does some justice to the Black half of the storyline, blatantly marginalized in the release version. The two “Cotton Club’s” are very different; “The Godfather Coda,” by contrast, involves small shifts and some intriguing tinkering, nothing less or more.

Coppola has tinkered with the films before. A 424-minute chronological version of the first two “Godfather” outings (without the intercutting between past and present) aired on network TV in 1977. A mondo 583-minute chronological edition of all three, with scenes cut from the original release versions, came out on VHS and laserdisc in 1992. Whatever the medium, some artists paint and move on; others return, obsessively, to the same canvas.

So the movie doesn’t work a miracle in this new version. How could it? Besides, lightning had already struck twice with same crime family, the first time revitalizing the gangster genre, the second time with the reigning king of all sequels. In the 1980s, director Richard Brooks was approached by Paramount to try a third “Godfather” movie, when Coppola was still refusing the offer he ultimately couldn’t refuse forever. When asked, Brooks declined. It seemed foolhardy, he later said, to “continue a story that had already ended.”

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‘THE GODFATHER CODA: THE DEATH OF MICHAEL CORLEONE’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPAA rating: R (for violence and language)

Running time: 2 hours, 37 minutes

Playing: Premieres Friday in some theaters where open; streaming Tuesday.

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