The Godfather

What is it about great actors and shameful final performances? Orson Welles gave his final performance as Unicron, the world-eating robot in Transformers: The Movie. Raul Julia took an ill-fated turn as M. Bison in Street Fighter. Jimmy Stewart (an episode of the Disney animated series Goof Troop) and Bela Lugosi (Plan 9 from Outer Space) went out with a whimper as well.

Now Marlon Brando's final work has hit stores in the form of voice work for Electronic Arts' newly released game based on his seminal mob flick The Godfather. (The version reviewed is for the PlayStation 2, but EA is also abusing a cherished cultural touchstone on the Xbox and PC, with portable and next-gen heresies set for release on the PSP and Xbox 360 in the future.)

At its heart, The Godfather game is just another knock-off of Grand Theft Auto but one that's set in the '40s. You start out by creating a generic low-level thug in the Corleone organization and then try to build him up as far into the operation as possible. But instead of beating up chicks, running cocaine, and smacking around Haitians, you beat up dames, run numbers, and smack around Italians. And, in a bastardization almost as grand as the one being perpetrated upon Francis Ford Coppola's film, The Godfather offers an unimaginative imitation of Grand Theft Auto's open-ended gameplay. You can play to finish the game or simply run around on the streets stealing cars, picking fights, and engaging in a number of incidental objectives that don't tie into the main story.

As for that story, you probably know it already. The game follows the plot of the movie fairly closely but awkwardly inserts your character into scenes where he just doesn't belong. For instance, you plant a gun in a restaurant's toilet in advance of a hit. You escort a mobster with a severed horse's head into a big-shot movie producer's bedroom. You leave the gun and take the canolis.

In order to put actual gameplay into some of these acts, certain liberties were taken, most of which stick out like sore thumbs. Explosive barrels and high speed, white-knuckle car chases with machine gun-toting gangsters hanging out the window are a bit flashy and over-the-top for the Godfather world.

If you love the film for its depiction of crime and power more than for anything it has to say about the subjects, The Godfather might be worth a play. On the surface, it's a competent-but-uninspired clone of Grand Theft Auto, and EA certainly tried to transfer the atmosphere of the film to the game at great expense. Robert Duvall and James Caan also did voicework for the game Al Pacino's voice and likeness don't appear in the game, so Michael Corleone now looks like Harry Connick, Jr.

However, it's still awfully far divorced from Coppola's film (the director wanted nothing to do with the game), and there's much more entertainment to be had for less money by simply buying The Godfather on DVD.