I’ve said this once or twice before, but the primary problem with The Godfather, Part III, which nobody ever liked and which is still regarded as the dishonorable bastard child of the Corleone saga, is that it didn’t respect the established arc of its main character.

Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone was a somber, soft-spoken, cold-hearted iceman in The Godfather, Part II (’74), a guy consumed by his own dark and guarded impulses at the finale.

But when he returned as a gray-haired, crew-cutted Don in The Godfather, Part III (’90), Vito Corleone‘s youngest son had undergone a personality transplant. He’d become a reflective, fair-minded, at times shoulder-shrugging fellow who was no longer a coldly calculating shark but a thoughtful, moderately reasonable and even amiable head of a crime family.

Two entirely different hombres.