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The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a gritty crime thriller from the early seventies with the great Robert Mitchum in a key role. He plays a tired family man in his fifties who is also a veteran low-tier criminal on the side. Due to a past misstep, he is up for time in prison and is contemplating cooperation with the cops in order to get off the hook. There are other shady characters as well, such as the gun-dealing Jackie Brown and the snitching bartender Dillon. You also get the sense that the police is no better than the crooks, ruthless and manipulative. All the actors does a splendid job and the movie is shot in a realistic, low-key way which adds to the suspension of disbelief.

However, the movie tended to confuse me at times and it is shot and written with a certain distance to the characters and their plight, which made it hard for me to really care for anyone, despite the likeable qualities of Robert Mitchum. Nothing really happened that was exciting except for a couple of tense scenes with gunrunner Jackie Brown, who incidentally gave name to Quentin Tarantino's more famous film from 1997. The movie had a depressive vibe to it from beginning to end, and while it is par for the course for this genre of gritty crime thrillers, it didn't manage to hit me on any emotional level. It was slightly interesting throughout, but ultimately underwhelming.

There is beauty in the crafting of this movie, but no storyline and very little drama. I spent the first half of the movie just figuring out who the characters were, and the whole mess just felt disjointed. The humour is very lowbrow and focuses on piss, flatulence, masturbation etc. I have no idea why it is considered a "masterpiece". To me, it was mostly boring.