GANGSTER SQUAD busts itself. Take a setup with potential. Cast a surefire lineup of charismatic actors. Deck them out with stylish duds, place ’em in lavish period settings. Then throw it all away on a script from the hind end of Bullville, directed with the subtlety of a meat cleaver. Inflicted upon 2013, where it wallowed into 71st place. Rest in pieces.

L.A., 1949. A secret team of cops is put together to smash the assorted rackets run by flashy crook Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn). Head bruiser among the pile-driving good guys is WW2 vet John O’Mara (Josh Brolin). One of his men, dapper Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) takes undercover to extremes by sleeping with ‘Grace Faraday’ (Emma Stone), Cohen’s squeeze.  Fists, bullets and grenades make hash out of enough cops, crooks and civilians to rival D-Day.

Except—other than the story framework and name dropping—it’s a crock. Based—with enough liberties to shame Denmark—on the non-fiction book by Paul Lieberman, yet screenwriter Will Beall (who really should have known better; he’d been a LAPD homicide cop for ten years) shows barely a trace of fidelity to fact, and director Ruben Fleischer amps up (and dumbs down) the violence to a ludicrous degree. Most movies based on history play fast and loose, but this one is just rabid.

Nick Nolte plays famous/infamous police chief William Parker. The territory for the squad had been previously mined in 1996 by Mulholland Falls (also with Nolte, when he hadn’t aged 200 years). Members of the team are Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Robert Patrick and Michael Peña: all are cliché postit’s, good actors inserted as audience-demographic sops (gimme a nerd, gimme a Sam Elliott type, gimme ethnic reps who wouldn’t get time zones close to working for the racist LAPD of the era). Brolin’s fine, Gosling’s featherweight (his weakest performance ever), Penn overacts up a tornado (half effective/half laughable), Stone is slinky. Brutality abounds, excess rules. It’s coarse balderdash, a whitewash travesty, a steaming heap of man-manure adorned with neat threads, vintage cars, fancy nightclubs and lots of yammering tommy guns. And enough slow-motion for six movies.

What does work really well is The Look—detailed effort in visual motif that is sensational throughout, thanks to Maher Ahmad’s stunning production design, Dion Beebe’s rich cinematography and Mary Zophres eye candy costume design (among her ace credits are Hail Caesar!, Inside Llewyn Davis and La La Land). There’s a nifty end credits sequence. Those exacting aspects get an A-plus, the toiling actors a B-minus, the sophomoric direction rates a C, the fool-me-twice script a D.

Cost was something twixt $60-75,000,000. The take took $46,000,000 in North America, with the rest of the world ponying up $59,200,000. Shovel $16,300,000 in disc sales.

With Mireille Enos (blood-streaked-floor-leading-to-had-baby-in-bathtub-during-machine gun fire-scene a rank low), Jon Polito, Sullivan Stapleton, Holt McCallany, Jack McGee. 113 minutes.