The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, review: Coppola fixes his greatest botch at last

• Dir: Francis Ford Coppola. Cast: Al Pacino, Andy Garcia, Talia Shire, Sofia Coppola, Diane Keaton, George Hamilton, Eli Wallach, Joe Mantegna, Donal Donnelly, Enzo Robutti. 15 cert, 158 mins

The one problem with The Godfather: Part III that no amount of re-editing can ever solve is that it isn’t The Godfather or The Godfather: Part II. Over the near-half-century since their making, the first two panels of Francis Ford Coppola’s great American triptych have lost not a microjoule of their ferocity, grandeur and tragic-epic force. Coppola never intended the troubled third instalment – written and shot on a breakneck deadline, some 15 years after the release of the second – to be a continuation of the tale as much as a feature-length epilogue.

He and Mario Puzo, the author of the Godfather novels, even came up with a title that framed it as such: The Death of Michael Corleone. But Hollywood marketing being what it is, the studio went with ‘Part III’ instead. What’s more, it had to be sent out to cinemas before Coppola was content he’d entirely made sense in the edit of its operatically heightened plot, involving incest, cursed bloodlines and serpentine Vatican conspiracies.

Thanks to Coppola’s much-publicised decision to cast his (entirely untrained) 18-year-old daughter Sofia – now an Oscar-winning filmmaker herself – in the pivotal role of Mary Corleone, Michael’s own teenage girl, it also arrived trailing the distinct whiff of nepotism, which became a focal point for critical attacks.

The supposed failure of The Godfather: Part III was always overstated. The scorn was tied partly to Coppola’s own fall from commercial and critical grace in the decade beforehand, and partly to the sheer nerve of it not being another masterpiece.

But its unfulfilled promise – even on its own terms – must have rankled Coppola, so the director has now recut it into something more closely aligned with his original intentions. Step one was to restore that talismanic standalone title: the film introduces itself with a card which reads “The Godfather, Coda”, but then gives “The Death of Michael Corleone” a screen to itself.

The plot’s broad sweep remains largely unchanged from The Godfather: Part III. Al Pacino’s now middle-aged Michael, sporting a granite-grey crew cut that looks less clippered than chiselled, attempts to take the Corleone family legitimate once and for all via a high-stakes business deal with the Catholic Church. Yet the paths of righteousness only lead him to still-murkier vales of gangsterism and corruption, in Manhattan, Rome and finally Sicily itself.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” runs Pacino’s most famous line, which the actor delivers with a growl that comes up from the ground.

It lands all the more powerfully now, thanks to the smoother opening act that precedes it. The first hour of the film has been comprehensively reordered, lending more agonised oomph to Michael’s plight while helping clarify his motives. (It also juices up the unrest his manoeuvrings inspire among his former associates-slash-rivals, including Joe Mantegna’s ambitious and exhilaratingly unpleasant Joey Zasa.)

The deal struck by Michael with Donal Donnelly's Archbishop Gilday of the Vatican Bank originally occurred 40 minutes into the film: this is now the opening scene, and echoes the sequence in the first Godfather film in which Marlon Brando’s Don Vito holds court in his study as his daughter’s wedding takes place outside. Coppola is inviting us to reflect on how far the Corleone family has come, and yet also how little has fundamentally changed.

The now immediately obvious inescapability of these patterns makes Michael’s quest to redeem the Corleone name all the more tragic, as an entire portfolio of original sins comes back to haunt not just him, but his innocent offspring. His son Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio) is an aspiring opera singer, while Mary is the honorary chair of the Vito Corleone Foundation – a charitable endeavour designed to cleanse the family line.

But again, the family line has other ideas, as Michael’s hot-headed illegitimate nephew Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia) embarks on an incestuous relationship with Mary while trying to make his own mark on the New York underworld.

Though the film’s second half has been considerably less tinkered-with than the first, Sofia Coppola’s notorious performance as Mary has been recalibrated to striking effect. Mary remains an awkward, naive and, yes, sometimes annoying presence – yet it’s now clear that this is simply who the character is, rather than a result of actorly ineptitude. Some ungainly moments that could be read either way have been judiciously cut, including a tantrum-like scamper away from her father and brother in Sicily.

The cost of this is a handful of clumsy transitions, but these are a price worth paying, and the film’s climax at the opera house in Palermo can now be savoured wince-free. This magnificent, devastating sequence remains almost untouched, though Coppola has cheekily replaced one moment of violence with a joltingly graphic alternate take. And there is a new, thrilling echo of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in the film’s closing seconds, which have been subtly but powerfully reworked to turn the series’ repeated blessing for long life, “Cent’anni” – Italian for ‘a hundred years’ – into a kind of existential hex.

Together, the changes feel definitive: to draw an equivalence with Apocalypse Now, it’s a Final Cut as opposed to a Redux, and a vindication for its director after 30 years. Redemption may have eluded Michael Corleone, but his third film was more fortunate.

In cinemas on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 December and on Blu-ray from Monday 7 December