Gangs of New York (18)

Grisly characters walk tall in this colossal work

Seemingly centuries ago, Martin Scorsese first announced his plans to film Herbert Asbury's Gangs Of New York, a chronicle of the street-fighters, scallywags and outright psychopaths who tried to claim as their own that city's virginal streets.

In reality, Scorsese has taken three decades to bring his adaptation to the screen, though most of the media attention has been focused on the past three years, as scheduled release dates came and went with no sign of a finished film. Were Scorsese and the producer, Harvey Weinstein, really locked in a battle more ferocious than anything depicted on screen? Was this going to be the breaking of one of American cinema's enduring mavericks?

We need not have worried. Gangs Of New York is an unruly but spectacular work, the colossal scale of which is never allowed to overshadow the earthy magnificence of its brutalised characters.

Among the many gangs there is one called the Plug Uglies, though in truth the entire cast could claim honorary membership of that clan – even Leonardo DiCaprio, whose newly bruised, misshapen face will give Titanic groupies sleepless nights for all the wrong reasons. The fine cinematographer Michael Ballhaus shoots these urchins to suggest Dickens by way of Goya, but the best joke is that they settle their grisly grievances against flamboyant sets erected at Rome's legendary Cinecittà Studios. When an elephant wanders into the midst of a riot, that seals it: Fellini-esque is the only word that fits.

The plot is pure pulp, with young Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio) pitching up in New York in the 1860s and becoming apprentice to the man who slaughtered his father. Bill the Butcher is a savage, bestial creation, deformed by a greasy moustache, and a glass eye against which he seductively taps the tip of a knife. But in Daniel Day-Lewis's towering performance there are hints of civility that make him even more hideous and complicated: when he makes his way through a massacre, searching for his intended victim, he has the graceful patience of a party guest looking for someone interesting to talk to.

Scorsese's vessel is almost capsized by a meddling individual – though it's not Harvey Weinstein who gets in the way, but Cameron Diaz, whose vapid turn as a pickpocket transforms a part that might have been merely superfluous into an ongoing irritation.

The director seems almost cruel to abandon her in the middle of this testosterone stink, with its furious battle sequences cut to chugging rock dirges, and its villain hogging the spotlight with a charismatic beastliness that the film only forsakes in its final seconds, when it ventures a tender tribute to latter-day New York.