[SilverLining1]

You can rate any movie you'd like 10/10 whenever you wish; you can rate "Tank Girl" a 10/10.

I've never seen GFIII, so I will refrain from comment. However, I will say that when it comes to the final film of an epic trilogy, a director has a responsibility to honor the tone and character development of the film's predecessors. More generally speaking, he has an obligation to keep his work on par with his past two films.

That is not to say that one film has to be equivalent to another in excellence, but one should see and feel a consistentcy in the director's artistic expression. From my limited viewing of GFIII, I simply don't see that. It's hard enough making a contemporary version of a film that so heavily relies on its 1950s (and earlier) context to succeed; seeing a helicopter attack Pacino and colleagues with a machine gun or Andy Garcia bone Sofia Coppolla doesn't exactly feel consistent with this.

Another pressing adage as to GFIII is, well, why ruin a good thing? Film viewers have a tendency to view a epic as a whole, and each part of that epic is quite significant in relation to its whole (it was Peter Jackson's understanding of this principal that makes LOTR such an accomplishment, even objectively speaking). The ending of GFII was a beautiful close to the story of two generations of an American mafia. It is not necessarily "wrong" to make a third Godfather, but at best, it seems superfluous to do so. At worst, you have an failed effort by a director to re-manifest a creation that may have been better off put to an end 15 years ago.