Publication Date: 09-12-2026

The Untouchables (1987) review

Dir. Brian De Palma

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

The Untouchables is the epitome of a great audience movie, which means it’s a rousing good time at home or at the theater. It’s almost guaranteed to satisfy the masses, with “satisfy” being the apt word to describe its almost instinctive ability to please. It’s a cut-and-dry crime-caper, gorgeously decorated and detailed to capture the essence of Capone-era Chicago, with an engaging script deftly executed by a talented roster of performers. If it spared a moment to bring Paper Lace’s already terrific ballad “The Night Chicago Died” to life by way of a montage or a raid sequence, then we’d have something resembling a masterpiece on our hands.

I kid to some degree, but to another I do not. The Untouchables transcends its few weaker elements because what it does right is such a joy to witness. It has terrific action sequences, great costumes and sets that go an extra mile to look authentic to the respective period, great Tommy Guns and rifles for added realism, and a memorable band of characters that go on to form the titular posse. This is set in motion by Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), a Prohibition agent sent to Chicago to stop Al Capone (Robert De Niro) and his illegal liquor operations that have turned the city of Chicago into a violent, gang-run hellhole — at least equipped with fashionable attire.

Eliot’s welcome-wagon to Chicago is realizing that Capone has ears on every street-corner that hear well enough to tip off corrupt policemen any time there is a raid in addition to learning the Chicago Police Department operates like the mob only with a more particular set of protocols. Unable to lock up Capone for being a cold-blooded murderer due to a lack of hard evidence, Eliot and his accomplices — Irish officer Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) and pals/shooters Oscar (Charles Martin Smith) and Giuseppe (Andy García) — decide to nail Capone on tax evasion to at least get the book thrown at him for a few years. They hope to buy time to clean up the streets of Chicago, where more dirty money exists than if the Federal Reserve operated on a swamp.

What transpires is a cops and capers flick involving Eliot and “the Untouchables” cracking down on Capone’s liquor-running operations and infiltrating gin-mills and speakeasies while putting together the necessary portfolio of evidence to lock him up. Eliot’s evident moral compass and family-man personality makes him a laughably easy target of Capone, who cackles at the thought of him of all people throwing him in the slammer. De Niro’s Capone is precisely what you’d expect from the veteran actor, although quite possibly a bit cheekier with less screentime too. He’s the kind of frazzled, shady businessman that will respond to you calling him a “son of a bitch” in front of his own kid by cursing out you and your family even if they don’t happen to be in your presence. You know, a real simple man.

The Untouchables are brought to life by a uniformly strong bunch of performers, with Connery standing out thanks to his ability to adjust to his role rather comfortably. Costner functions on a pretty straight-and-narrow pathway in terms of bringing the no frills Ness to life, but he does a rather admirable job at being both watchable and a likable protagonist. I also didn’t need another film to remind me how great of a character-actor Andy García is, but I’ll take it anyway, for he comes in at certain moments here that affirm his talent at making the best and biggest out of what would normally be minor occurrences.

Consider the role García (and Costner, for that matter) play in The Untouchables‘ most iconic sequence, which takes place in a train station in a scene directly inspired by the “Odessa Steps” sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. García seems like another gun for hire one-upping Costner while his character does one of the first unambiguously moral things in the whole film, but his role quickly transcends a stand-in shooter to an abruptly and uncomfortably physical performance that ranks up with one of his and the film’s finest, most darkly funny moments. I guess what I’m trying to say is, the scene is a blast.

The film was directed by Brian De Palma and you can chalk it up as another great film by the New Hollywood director, whose crafty, prolifically active camerawork and wisely employed unsteady hand work to add style to a film that already has a serviceable amount of visual and narrative substance. De Palma has openly given more credit to the film’s writer, David Mamet, than himself, citing him as the lifeblood of the picture and the one who brought it all together from the standpoints of performances and scriptwriting. De Palma has always been something of a Hollywood formalist, appreciating the aesthetic of classic films and adopting it for his pictures. It’s only wise he’d humbly give himself a “backseat” role to Mamet, but it’s suffice to say that they both put on an enticing show (save for De Palma’s recurring tendency to rely on horror-movie cliches in hopes to inspire suspense, a move that’s thankfully only employed a small handful of times over the course of the film).

The Untouchables is a riotous good time, and one of the best films set/filmed in Chicago I’ve yet to see. It’s a hybrid between a gumshoe investigative drama, a period-specific potboiler, and an ethically muddy thriller that only knows how to satisfy. Some films would bog down the pulp of this story with brooding backdrops compounded by cynical and jaded emphasis on a city run by a mob that’s enabled by police. De Palma and Mamet see the plot and thus celebrate it by craftily building towards its destruction, a move that pays off to great success. Present day films of the genre need to find a way to captivate like this once again.

Starring: Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro, Sean Connery, Charles Martin Smith, and Andy García. Directed by: Brian De Palma.