I have a love/hate relationship with Del Toro movies. I wind up not liking them nearly as much as everyone else. A few I love, more I don’t. So I didn’t go into Nightmare Alley with high expectations. I wasn’t familiar with the original film (there are gaps) or novel so I didn’t bring in any expectations in that regard. What I got was a wildly mixed bag.

The flick is about a man on the run who takes up with a carnival and learns the tricks of the trade. He later goes into business as a stage mentalist… and falls into a con game between him, a sultry psychiatrist, and some very wealthy marks.

The first half of this movie set in the carnival suffers a bit too much from Del Toro “Gilman” adoration. As in, the director loves a little too much his old school movie villains. He sides or identifies with them so he makes a movie about boning them… or, in this case, hanging out WAY too long with a bunch of carnies, hucksters, con-artists, and thieves. Which maybe would have worked better if that was actually what this movie was about.

But, no, it eventually shifts to the real plot, using some of the carnie tricks to run confidence games. It’s good to have setup… but maybe not this much setup. Just dropping the carnival left me disappointed even if I was a little impatient with its pacing. But the conman side of the story perked my interest a bit more and really started to ooze that old school film noire charm.

In the end though, that carnival setup was important for the sting in the very last scene. But it didn’t feel earned. Perhaps because Del Toro loves the (pardon me) freak show a little too much. The tragedy the movie was aiming for fell flat because the setup wasn’t convincingly tragic.

Which is a lot of words to say that I am hot and cold on this flick. There are some elements that work and some that work despite the length. There’s clearly a lot of love for old noire films. In fact, I thought this whole movie might have been pretty cool in black & white (and apparently there’s plans to release such a version). Not sure I’d want to to sit through this again to see it, but I think that would be a stylish move.

Score: 76