This Perfect Crime Masterpiece Changed Cinema Forever, and Now You Can Watch It for Free

This Perfect Crime Masterpiece Changed Cinema Forever, and Now You Can Watch It for Free Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II.Image via Paramount Pictures By  Sam Barsanti Published 19 minutes ago Sam Barsanti has written about pop-culture for 10 years, and his work has appeared at The A.V. Club, Primetimer, IGN, and Collider. He has also contributed to the popular daily Hustle newsletter, which covers tech and startup news. He'll happily talk to anyone about comic book movies (he thinks the MCU peaked with Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and giant robots (he thinks some of the Transformers movies are good), and he canonically exists in The CW's "Arrowverse" series of superhero shows. Sam is also a published poet and horror writer, and his fiction work has appeared on The No Sleep Podcast.   Sign in to your Collider account Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy is required viewing for basically everyone everywhere, but that’s not to say they’re homework movies. The three movies, give or take the underrated and fun third one, are masterpieces of dramatic filmmaking, charting the epic rise and fall of an influential Italian-American crime family over the course of a few decades. And here’s some good news if you haven’t seen the perfect first two Godfather movies (or if you’d rather just spend Thanksgiving with the Corleones than your real family): The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are streaming for free on Tubi.

The Godfather is an incredible and brilliant film, holding a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 98% from audiences, but The Godfather Part II is generally regarded as being at least as good as its predecessor (a famously rare thing for a sequel to achieve, aside from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back). Not to disparage the offerings on free streamers, but those aren’t the kinds of near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes numbers you can generally find on a platform like Tubi (home of something called Shark Side of the Moon and the 2011 version of The Thing), so you should get over there while you can.

Why Is ‘The Godfather Part II’ So Good?

Michael Corleone holds Fredo by the face at a party and stares at him intently in The Godfather Part II, 1974.Image via Paramount Pictures

The short answer to “Why is The Godfather Part II so good?” is that it builds on everything from the first movie, which was really good already. It takes the characters and themes established in the first movie and solidifies them, but rather than feeling like a retread of what happened before, it becomes a tragic spiral-like cycle leading to the hollow “victory” of Part II’s brilliant final sequence. Also, while some of the best actors in The Godfather don’t survive the first part (Marlon Brando, James Caan), Part II adds Robert De Niro as a young version of Brando’s Vito Corleone in flashback sequences to the family’s early crime days that De Niro knocks out of the proverbial park.

In terms of plot, Part II is about Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) taking over for his father and trying to survive the aftermath of the first movie’s bloody finale — in which Michael has all of his family enemies executed in order to ensure his rule over New York City’s world of organized crime. By the second movie, his hunger for power is causing his empire to be spread a little thin, forcing him to make riskier deals, like an ill-fated deal in pre-revolution Cuba, that draw too much attention from the U.S. federal government. Even as it all gets bigger and more epic, though, it’s all still about Michael’s relationship with his family, a point hammered in by the aforementioned final scene.

And, uh, you don’t have to watch the third movie. The first two are canonically the two halves of one story, which is why Coppola retitled Part III as The Godfather Coda when he released a re-edited version a few years ago. Michael does eventually pay for the bad things he does, but… not in the way you’d expect. So maybe you should watch the third movie.

The Godfather Part II

Like Follow Followed R Drama Crime Release Date December 20, 1974 Runtime 202 minutes Director Francis Ford Coppola Writers Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzo Prequel(s) The Godfather

Cast

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• Al Pacino Don Michael Corleone
• Robert Duvall Tom Hagen

Sequel(s) The Godfather Part III Franchise(s) The Godfather Genres Drama, Crime Powered by Expand Collapse

• Movie
• The Godfather Part II
• Francis Ford Coppola

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