Black Mass doesn’t reinvent the gangster movie genre and it seems perfectly aware of that fact. It’s a movie that lovingly embraces enough clichés in a shrewd, enthusiastic way that when it breaks from these tropes the movie feels dangerous, thrilling and entertainingly unstable – much like its center character.
That character is real-life Boston mobster James “Whitey†Bulger (Johnny Depp). In this movie’s time span – jumping about in the twenty years of 1975-1995 – the audience comes to learn of the triumphs, heartbreaks, and pitfalls of Bulger’s reign of terror.
According to the film, much of this reign of terror was actually made possible by the FBI, most notably Agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). Connolly is portrayed as an ambitious G-man whose eyes are set on bringing down the Italian mafia in the northern point of Boston.
Connolly, who has loose connections to Whitey Bulger and his brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), knows that the he and the Bulgers have a common enemy in the Italian mafia so an alliance is struck up: Whitey will provide intel and the FBI will turn a blind eye to his criminal activity.
Connolly soon realizes that once he has opened Pandora’s Box it’s not going to close without a fight. Much has been made of Depp’s performance and rightfully so. I can’t remember the last time Depp played a villain, but he seems to be enjoying every moment of it.
Buried under layers of prosthetic make-up, Depp disappears. Perhaps the most effective piece of his make-up and performance is the work that he does with his eyes. Depp sports chilling blue contact lenses that make him look like a land-born shark.
Depp’s hard stare and the animated movement he provides with his eyes tells the audience everything they need to know about Whitey – he’s always focused, he’s always watching, and he never misses a thing.
Edgerton is also supremely effective in his role as Connelly. Perfectly balancing the will it takes it make it in an organization like the FBI and the spinelessness that most people have around Whitey Bulger.
The movie is packed wall-to-wall with great character actors. Kevin Bacon, Corey Stoll, Adam Scott and David Harbour pack the scenes set within the corridors of FBI headquarters, even if they are only showing up for a few lines at a time.
Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane and Juno Temple provide for the many people whom Whitey deals with on a daily basis. The amount of recognizable faces in this film is both a positive and a negative.
While it’s fun to watch Edgerton and Bacon get into verbal fisticuffs with one another, I found myself distracted when the faces of Dakota Johnson and Benedict Cumberbatch would come on screen, for different reasons.
Cumberbatch is so distinctive looking and doesn’t really resemble Depp’s Whitey in any way. He’s convincing in the role of the street king’s kid brother who has escalated himself out of crime, but when the two share the screen by appearance alone I visually never believed them as brothers.
Johnson on the other had is in the movie so infrequently that I began to wonder why they cast such a big star with a lot of exposure for such a small role so much so that it actually became distracting.
One of the other things surrounding the film that is somewhat problematic is that much of the Whitey Bulger had its best parts borrowed for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, a fictional film that featured a Boston crime boss (Jack Nicholson) inspired – loosely in some forms, very closely in others – by Whitey Bulger.
But, director Scott Cooper finds the spaces to educate the audience on the real Bulger. Cooper has avoided the gangster movie trope of objectivism provided to us in many movies like Scorsese’s GoodFellas or Casino and has decided instead to make a morality play.
There are bad men everywhere who do bad things. The scary part of the moral, according to Cooper’s film, is that they are bad because we let them be.
Black Mass is flawed, but well worth seeing. Depp alone provides enough entertainment that even if the rest of the movie stunk I would still say watch it for the performance. Lucky for us, the rest of the movie is pretty darn good.
Brian Laughran
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