Forget for a moment that Johnny Depp has made a successful and
long-awaited comeback with Black
Mass. Let's talk about director Scott Cooper, whose big break was that Jeff
Bridges won an Oscar for the mediocre Crazy
Heart. Ever since he's been a filmmaker of some potential and little
payoff. Remember Out of the
Furnace and the tremendous
cast? How was that movie so disappointing? Here's a hint: it wasn't the acting. Black Mass is pretty much in the same boat. It's
a film that features Depp at his absolute best, one of the finest performances
of his storied career, but everything else surrounding his portrayal of
infamous Boston mobster Whitey Bulger can be found in better crime movies by
better directors.
If there's a recurring problem in Cooper's
movies it's stagnation. Black
Mass doesn't really go
anywhere, despite all the murders and the fear and the morose denizens of dingy
South Boston. It's a shame because Bulger's reign of terror in
"Southie" is full of many dark twists, interesting coincidences,
strange encounters with famous gangsters, and ultimately a years-long flight
from justice. Almost none of that is seen in the film we're presented, though.
Beginning in 1975, the story begins as Bulger, the powdery-skinned,
razor-toothed leader of the violent Winter Hill gang, is still just a
small-time hood. He's not someone you want to mess with, though, and it isn't
long before he's popped a cap in some poor guy's head for the most trivial of
reasons. While Bulger is a local menace, he still loves his family. That
includes his mom, his brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), an influential
state senator, his young son and the boy's mom (Dakota Johnson).
Loyalty matters above all in South Boston,
though, and Bulger begins to rise in the criminal ranks due to the help of
childhood friend John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), now an FBI agent in charge of
wiping out organized crime. Instead of actually doing that, Connolly and Bulger
forge an unholy alliance to destroy all of Bulger's rivals. For Connolly, it's
a chance to advance his own career and show that despite his allegiance to law
and order, he's really just a good South Boston boy at heart. Bulger, who
doesn't consider himself a "rat" despite murdering others for any
perceived disloyalty, uses the alliance to become more brazen than ever, the
streets running red with the blood his crew has spilled.
The moral murkiness between Bulger and
Connolly, and to a lesser extent Bulger's brother, is ripe to be explored but
the screenplay by Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk is too simplistic, too
reliant on familiar story beats to stand on its own. We know, for instance,
anytime someone rubs Bulger the wrong way that the very next scene will be them
being murdered in some horrible fashion. Connolly's clumsy attempts to straddle
the line between law and disorder are kind of funny but they aren't really
meant to be. It's just his dishonesty is so obvious that we can't help but
chuckle. There's no tension, no irony, little humor, nothing that advances our
knowledge of who Bulger is or elevates the film beyond just another mob flick.
Cooper seems to be cribbing from the Martin Scorsese book of mob culture and
movie montages, inviting comparisons to films Black
Mass can't measure up to. The
sad thing is Bulger's full story would make a Hell of a movie, but what we're
treated to is basically one murder after another with no clear point. Nothing
ever really begins to take shape.
The visceral thrill of the gangster
lifestyle carries the film far, though, and there are a number of colorful
characters that give it life. Obviously much of the attention will be focused
on Depp, and deservedly so. Let's be honest; Depp needed to get away from
playing glorified cartoon characters and bite into something meaty, and his Bulger
is menacing to the core. Oddly enough, he's still overly made-up, unnecessarily
so. No amount of reconstruction was going to make Depp look like Bulger, and he
comes off resembling a White Walker from Game
of Thrones. It's a little distracting until you get a sense of how terrible
Bulger really is, and then it starts to fit. Edgerton puts on a decent Boston
accent for an Aussie, as do the rest of the cast in smaller but no less
effective performances. The real stand outs are Jesse Plemons, looking
thick-skinned as Bulger associate Kevin Weeks, and Dakota Johnson as Bulger's
common law wife, Lindsey. She doesn't get much time but her domestic scenes
opposite Depp open up the possibilities of what this film could have been if
given more time. That said, it still clocks in at just over two hours, and
that's with an entire section edited out (the fugitive scenes that featured
Sienna Miller were removed). There are certainly some other areas Cooper could
have done away with, such as a bizarre, pointless fascination with Bulger's
investment in Jai Alai, a sport nobody cares about and has little
significance.
While Scorsese's The Departed will undoubtedly be in the back of
your mind the whole time, Black Mass is a solid enough effort to appease fans
of the genre. Depp invests in the role of Bulger like nothing he's ever
committed to before and he's the primary reason to get out and see the film
right now. Depp is deadly good and deserves better than "solid enough" but that's all
Cooper seems capable of delivering.
Rating: 3 out of 5
