![]() The film opens with an entreaty from Donal Donnelly’s duplicitous archbishop that sets up the entire scheme, a scene that originally didn’t arrive until 39 minutes in. “Don Corleone, I need your help,” are now the first words we hear. Al Pacino in "The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone." (Courtesy Paramount Pictures) (I think part of the reason the film was so poorly received was because we all wanted to see some gangsters and instead got a bunch of crooked accountants and sinister priests.) After a reported 363 picture edits, “The Godfather, Coda” has been slimmed down to 158 minutes, with the most important alteration coming right up top. ![]() The home video release of “The Godfather Part III” added eight minutes of exposition to the theatrical cut’s 162-minute running time, but still couldn’t quite make comprehensible the movie’s mess of labyrinthine plot twists involving the Vatican Bank, the Immobiliare real estate conglomerate and a crazy conspiracy theory about the mysterious death of Pope John Paul I. This isn’t the first time he’s futzed with the footage. But the director’s most effective rescue attempt yet is “The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone,” a revelatory revision of his saga’s final chapter that feels like a far more focused and purposeful film, even if there are some things that can’t be fixed in an editing room. But the sour word of mouth quickly turned toxic - with the press particularly savaging Sofia Coppola’s stilted performance as doomed daughter Mary Corleone - and over the years the film has become something of a punchline, a go-to shorthand reference for sequels that never should have been made.Īlways a tinkerer, the 81-year-old Coppola last year released “Apocalypse Now: Final Cut,” which splits the difference between the phantasmagoric perfection of the 1979 original and his bloated, unnecessarily talky 2001 “Apocalypse Now Redux,” as well as “The Cotton Club: Encore,” which fleshed out and clarified important aspects of his notorious 1984 bomb. The film received, for the most part, respectful reviews and seven Oscar nominations that seemed more out of habit than actual enthusiasm. Millions of holiday dinners across America suffered a mass exodus of dads, uncles and boy cousins rushing through our meals to catch an early evening show, and I distinctly remember how afterward none of us really wanted to admit we hadn’t liked it very much. One of the most anticipated films of all time, Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part III” arrived 30 Christmases ago like a lump of coal in the stockings of disappointed audiences. A still from "The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone." (Courtesy Paramount Pictures) This article is more than 1 year old.
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