Robert De Niro Is A Shadowy Mobster In The Trailer For Netflix’s True Crime Hit ‘The Irishman’

If you could draw up the ideal team to make a mobster movie, chances are at least some of you’d want Martin Scorsese to direct, and Robert De Niro and Al Pacino to star. Well, guess what: those are exactly the minds behind Netflix‘s new true-crime hit, The Irishman.

The film is based on the life — and death — of Jimmy Hoffa, an American labor union leader who famously disappeared in 1975, before being declared legally dead some seven years later. Given Hoffa’s body was never found, and that he had long ties to the mob, many have assumed he ran afoul of his organised crime buddies — which, judging by the trailer for The Irishman, is the direction that Scorsese is taking things.

Pacino plays Hoffa in the film, while De Niro plays Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran, a crime enforcer who had multiple ties to the doomed union leader. Because The Irishman will skip around through time, the pair of actors have also been ‘digitally de-aged’ so that they might convincingly play the younger versions of their characters.

Well, ‘convincingly’ might be a bit of a stretch. The trailer, shot through as it is with the ecstatic, antic darkness you’d expect from any Scorsese crime picture, obscures most of the digitally de-aging process until the very final moment. And when we do get a glimpse of a young De Niro, the effects are… well, probably best to check it out for yourself.

An exact release date for The Irishman is yet to be announced — the trailer promises that it’ll hit Netflix in the American Fall, so that’ll probably mean late November or December. It’s also getting a limited American theatrical release, which Netflix tends only to do to qualify for the Oscar race, so consider that a stamp of approval from Netflix onto this project.

Watch the full trailer below, and do make sure you spend the first two minutes preparing yourself for Playstation 2 cutscene Robert De Niro.