Fridge Brilliance
- At the start of the film, the priest tells his congregation that the worst kind of evil is when good people do nothing. Later, Conner reminds Rocco that Evil Man = Dead Man. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Rocco dies. He spent his entire adult life working for the Yakavetta Family, passively witnessing all manner of evil acts, with Papa Joe claiming that he could have brought the entire family down if he had only turned state's evidence. Thus, his entire character arc is one long Redemption Equals Death.
This one was possibly unintentional, but that might make it even more brilliant. In the priest's Bystander Syndrome speech, he specifically mentions the 1964 case of Kitty Genovese. While the "thirty eight people watched and did nothing" turned out to not only be utterly untrue and literally impossible (more details on this on the main page, and on the Bystander Syndrome page) but mostly made up of whole cloth by the media, specifically the NY times reporter who first broke the story, this wasn't established until 2007, eight years after the first movie was made and released. So at the time the first movie was made, it was a legitimate analogy to draw.
Now watch All Saints Day, made in 2009. Find out how Il Duce got started. He thought he was doing the right thing by killing Mafioso, but it turns out he was being deliberately fed mis-information to serve the purposes and the ego of someone he trusted. This is a direct parallel to the "thirty eight witnesses" idea; the population of New York, and even America, were outraged by Genovese's murder, but were deliberately fed mis-information by the NY Times... which wasn't seriously challenged for over forty years because no one was willing to challenge the NY Times and its editor. The duality could even be stretched further: no matter the circumstances, Il Duce did a lot to hinder the spread and influence of the Mafia. The outcry over the lack of police involvement in the Genovese murder (because they were called, several times, but dismissed it as a 'domestic dispute') was a major reason for the establishment of the 911 emergency system.
- Romeo either was never actually licensed to operate a forklift, or else he was not licensed by a terribly reputable trainer. The entire "drive the forklift full of heavily armed Irish twins into the warehouse" plan fails from the get go because he makes a very fundamental error: Forklift operators are trained to drive the forklift with the forks as low to the ground as possible, both to give them a clear field of view ahead, and also to keep the center of gravity low (hitting a pothole with three tons of cargo hoisted ten feet up in the air is a very good way to get someone killed). Then again, Romeo is, like his predecessor Rocco, kind of a moron at times.
