The Departed (2006)

MARTIN SCORSESE FINALLY WON BEST DIRECTOR!!!! XD

How my ratings work:
5 - I really liked/loved it
4 - I liked it
3 - Could've been better/worth a look
2 - Just didn't live up to the potential
1 - Simply aweful

Was this the movie that Scorsese desearved the best director Oscar for? Some say yes, others say no. Personally I think Raging Bull and Goodfellas are the movies he should've won for. But I'm not gonna complain because the Academy finally recognized Scorsese. After 27 years of being nominated, he finally got the award he desearved. Not that he needed an oscar to prove his worth in the movie world. Scorsese is by far the one of the best directors of any generation. But this movie is still worth a watch. It's a rivetting tale of murder, deceit, and betrayel. Everyone gives it their all. Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Mark Whalberg are all at the top of their game here. I don't really need to go into the plot details, there are plenty of other reviews on here that will do that for you. August 4, 2008

"A Modern Classic for those Rat C@*k !!!

If not the best motion picture of all time. This has to be in the top 3!!!

When I first saw the trailers for this film on TV I was split down the middle. Being a massive fan of Martin Scorsese I was hooked. Yet never quite being a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio made me a bit indifferent. Then seeing the icon Jack Nicholson tagged to the picture gave my flesh goosebumps. The names Scorsese/Nicholson meant "Great Movie" to me. So because of that I avoided any remaining information about the picture so I could walk in opening weekend and be surprised.

Right from the outset with Jack's monologue of his harsh outlook on existence I was lost in the world of the South Boston underworld. Through police corruption via Matt Damon's character & vigilance through sacrifice from DiCaprio.
The movie further cemented itself in greatness with the amazing supporting cast. Martin Sheen brought in his 'A' game. Excitement and laughter came across me when I saw one of my favorites Alec Baldwin take the screen in a perfect role for him. Marc Walburg stepped up his dramatic chops even though his character most likely came natural for him. Matt Damon played the bit of hidden scumbag quite well. Then the biggest magic of all to me was that Scorsese was finally able to make a DiCaprio fan out of me with a very powerful performance.

The story was so intense & alive you are along for the journey the entire time. It's almost as living it through eyes of someone else. The brutal realism of the violence where none of it is played for shock value or over the top theatrics is the final piece of truth that Scorsese uses to bring this all to vibrant yet rough polish.

Yet to share one more thing with you all as to how great this film is. During the entire showing the first time I saw it on the big screen. My friend Dougie who tends to talk, talk talk & ramble on & on & on actually shut his mouth through the whole thing. SCORSESE IS GOD !

Now to this DVD version. The two-disc special edition is the ultimate. Not only because you have a copy of the widescreen version of 'the DEPARTED' you also have a disc of amazing special features. It's not cluttered yet they give you a deeper appreciation of the film.

*an incredible documentary about Whitey Bulger & the Irish mob of South Boston who the writer based the persona of Jack Nicholson's character on.
* Feature length documentary of the entire career of Martin Scorsese
*Featurette of Little Italy's crime & violence and how that and the crime drama genre influenced the mob films of Scorsese
*9 additional scenes with intros by Martin himself

Pick up this version if you are hunting for the perfect DVD of 'the Departed'!
Unless you have Blu-Ray this is the one. July 9, 2008

No One Here Gets Out Alive

If you've gotten to the point where you're reading movie reviews, you probably don't need a plot synopsis, so let's skip it. So how good is this movie...? I would say that this movie is to cinema what "An American Tragedy" is to literature - the most poorly made great piece of work of its time.

It's a great movie in the following ways: 1) The script is tightly plotted. Nothing is superfluous, nothing is overdone or overlooked, and the REAL RARITY? YOU ACTUALLY HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION. If you miss a second of this movie, you won't understand how the rest of it unfolds. 2) It's nice to watch some of the best living American actors all do their thing in a single film. Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo DiCaprio turn in particularly fine performances, and Matt Damon seemed to be extending his range (happily), playing a character for whom one cannot feel sorry, nor want to take home to meet Mom. 3) Depending on how you feel about one liners generally, the one liners are good, and very apt. I could go on about the familial and racial subtexts here as well, but suffice it to say that there is more than one character trying to please Daddy, and if you're black, Italian, Arab or Catholic, the first twenty minutes won't give you the warm fuzzies.

The Departed is less than stellar in the following ways: 1) As mentioned in several other reviews, the ending is a bit ludicrous. It felt like plot twists were being made for their own sake, rather than for the good of the film or the story. Without being a spoiler, let me just say here that I DID respect the choice NOT to pander to the mass audience's sensibilities in terms of what happens to the "good" and "bad" guys, or to reveal too much information in the end. 2) A few of these (albeit brilliant) actors are cast as themselves. Jack Nicholson brought out Jack the bad guy/madman for us, and Alec Baldwin was as smarmy on screen as we filthy little pigs are accustomed to seeing him offscreen. Most of these actors really brought their A-games though. And really, are Jack and Alec playing themselves the worst thing you could watch? Methinks not! 3) Aside from the ending, my one complaint with the script is that it was over-plotted and under-characterized. There were so many plot lines (two A lines, as well as B and C lines) that there just wasn't time for the main characters to have much of an arc. From beginning to end, Costello is Costello, Sullivan is Sullivan and Costigan is Costigan. The only two characters who seem to take themselves off the path they initially set out on were Mark Wahlberg and Vera Farmiga's characters.

Departures in The Departed: Although the characters in this film are believeable and very well acted, make no mistake: this is a plot driven movie. This seems contrary to the recent films of most of the lead actors, as well as for director Martin Scorcese. Also, this is a film that was truly made in the editing room. Although DiCaprio and Damon have the two A plot lines, they're in only 2 or 3 scenes together. There's a lot of editorial juxtaposition, cutting back and forth, and it can get a bit obvious - and overbearing. Another departure from Scorcese's style can be found in the cinematography, which is tighter and less panaromic than he seems to prefer. However, once you've seen a shot of Jack Nicholson lit in redlight showering two half naked women in coke, you'll remember whose movie you're watching.

All in all, I would say buy the movie. But don't turn away - you'll miss something important. June 23, 2008

Good except for the ending.

Film noir crime thriller set in Boston, Massachusetts which follows the efforts of the Massachusetts State Police as they try to apprehend a notorious gangster and mass murderer played by Jack Nicholson by placing an undercover cop played by Leonardo DiCaprio in his crew to get close to him and gain intel and valuable evidence that will put Nicholson away. But unbeknownst to the Massachusetts State Police, Jack Nicholson has a mole of his own inside their very Department. A good crime thriller directed by Martin Scorsese that flows quickly through its two plus hours with a sharp plot, interesting characters and a compelling vision that is not undone by a lot of machismo on the part of the mainly male characters and a high body count. Matt Damon is excellent as the phoney cop in the pay of Jack Nicholson's gangster and Leonardo DiCaprio is also on form as the undercover cop playing a game of cat and mouse with Matt Damon as the two try to uncover each other's identity. However I felt that the ending to this film was fairly botched, such that what should have been a 5 star film was only a 4 star film, which is a shame because the film was excellent up until this point. Good but not perfect. June 8, 2008

Mediocrefellas

First time round I found The Departed a disappointingly average film, but on a second viewing it's clear I misjudged it: it really is a quite bad one. Scorsese's weaknesses as a storyteller have often been discussed, but he's not helped here by a remarkably poor and horrendously overpopulated script from the usually much more interesting William Monahan that at once dumbs down the original Infernal Affairs and simultaneously overcomplicates the storytelling. For all the additional characters and running time there's no grander design at work here to compensate. It may strain for grand opera but it simply comes across as off-key light operetta sung by people with sore throats.

The chief problem is the film's funereal pacing, which the clumsy editing and energetic camerawork increasingly fail to hide. The film takes forever to set up its plot - the film is half over before Matt Damon's undercover mobster who has worked his way into a Boston police task force is ordered to find himself - but never compensates by fleshing out the characters or adding any substance to the story. If anything, underneath all the bloat and bombast the film has seriously dumbed down the Infernal Affairs trilogy's underlying themes of identity, role playing and the need to find some kind of redemption in a world that requires you to be corrupt in order to live with yourself in some kind of peace. Instead, it's become a star vehicle in the worst sense of the phrase, where the central duo of police mole in the underworld and underworld mole in the police are effectively sidelined for so much of the picture that they almost become bit players.

Yet while we get seemingly endless and often incredibly long scenes of Jack Nicholson grandstanding, doing rat impersonations, waving sex toys around, insulting priests and generally impersonating Long John Silver as the cardboard mob moss, they really tell us nothing about either the character or the story. For all the constant repetition of his catchphrase "The point is," there simply is no point to most of these scenes other than padding out a minor supporting character (who in the original had no particular personal relationship with either main character) enough to attract an A-list actor and in the process unbalancing the film so much that he actually becomes the leading role. Scorsese has always shown a tendency to relentlessly hammer home the same point over and over again at great length despite making it perfectly well early in the film, and too many of Nicholson's scenes seem to be like hearing exactly the same joke very slightly paraphrased over and over and over again.

Unfortunately the problem isn't limited to Nicholson's resolutely unmenacing cartoonish villain. While both Leonardo DiCaprio and Damon (looking so much like James MacArthur that at times you keep on expecting Jack Lord to turn up and say "Book him, Dano") give stronger performances than their poorly written characters deserve, too many of the supporting roles have been beefed up or created purely to add more star power. There's no narrative reason for Ray Winstone or Mark Wahlberg's clichéd characters (do Nicholson and Martin Sheen's undercover chief really need sidekicks, especially when Wahlberg's mere presence makes the last act isolation of DiCaprio utterly nonsensical?), while characters like Alec Baldwin's Steve McGarrett figure just leave the film feeling horribly overpopulated with too many people competing for screentime at the expense of the story and what should have been the central duo's dilemma. Not that there's much dilemma left. DiCaprio's undercover cop fares best, but Damon's undercover crook is much less interesting than Andy Lau's equivalent in the original - no longer torn between playing a good cop and genuinely wanting to change and become the good person he pretends to be, he's reduced to a rather bland half-dimensional stereotype while the contrived and underdeveloped romantic triangle is straight out of 30s melodrama, not helped by Vera Farmiga's tendency to change her expression every syllable in what increasingly looks like an impersonation of Corinne Bohrer. With characters this thin it's hard to get involved in the film as more than a disinterested observer and consequently there's not even any tension to any of the setpieces - the surveillance operation that goes wrong tipping both sides off to the moles in their ranks, the failed attempt by one mole to identify another at the cinema or a warehouse shootout all fall surprisingly flat even as exercises in technique.

All this would be forgivable if the film was more interesting or even sporadically exciting, but sadly it's a very dull and drawn out affair that never justifies two-and-a-half hours of screen time. The original was a tight 100-minute thriller with a great pulp premise elevated by good writing and fine performances by two directors with barely a fraction of Scorsese's talent. There's absolutely no reason that it shouldn't have been the basis for a terrific American remake that could even have improved on the original, but sadly this is a case of far too much talent for the film's own good. Distinctly Mediocrefellas.

Aside from the Scorsese on Scorsese documentary, extras are surprisingly light for a two disc set - some deleted scenes, a couple of short featurettes and a trailer. April 28, 2008

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