You get chills whenever he’s onscreen, especially in close-up, when his eyes can become as cold and menacing as any weapon. Unaware of his informant status at the time, Whitey’s gang members’ only chance to save themselves and reduce their various punishments is to eventually testify against Whitey and tell the authorities everything they’ve seen. Covering Bulger’s story from 1975 to the early 1990s, Black Mass awkwardly stages the long and complicated tale of how federal agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) recruited his childhood pal into becoming an informant against the Italian mob (constantly referred to, of course, as “Wops and Dagos”) and ended up empowering a murderous psychopath.
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Also wasted in this movie is Kevin Bacon an FBI department head; Dakota Johnson as a couple shades of Whitey’s girlfriend; Peter Sarsgaard as a insane drug addict; Corey Stoll as a mean-spirited Assistant U.S. attorney and Adam Scott as stands around looking intense FBI guy. The two are as chalk and cheese, with neither interfering in the other’s “business”. There is enough juice to be milked out here but since it is a real story, Cooper doesn’t dramatise the relationship between the two brothers. “For 16 years he was on the lam and he wasn’t causing any trouble”. He is drunk on power and isn’t ready to surrender until he’s lived most of his life and is finally caught, as a frail old man. “Good on him”.
There’s a scene right at the beginning of Black Mass that pretty much lays out what the film is like. But Depp, who sympathetically played John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies“, says he sought to find Bulger’s humanity. If you cross him, you’re dead. “Shame on him. That was a very stupid, insensitive comment”.
This is an ideal role for Depp because it calls on both his formidable charisma – Bulger’s terrifying presence would chill the blood whenever he walked into a room – and his penchant for hiding in plain sight…His convincingly psychotic and homicidal Bulger is a Nosferatu look-alike, a bloodless vampire of crime whose performance is the essence of this film. It’s nice to be proven wrong about her. She was the only halfway decent (no pun intended) part of Fifty Shades, and she’s very good here, drawing out one of the rawer performances we’ve seen from Depp. “I thought it was a family secret and you gave it up to me-boom-just like that”, Bulger taunts.
Black Mass made me think of The Departed, where the characters are all likable, even the Whitey standin, Jack Nicholson. As usual, Depp leans heavily on makeup and accent work to sell his character.
Depp isn’t the only one who is distractingly disguised in this movie. Scorsese did the gritty gangster pic first and arguably better than anyone ever will, and has even already done the Bulger story. “They come to movies like this for psychological truth, for emotion and humanity”.
Sadly, Cooper and his writers opt for an exposition-laden, this-then-that narrative that relies on criminal depositions to provide a rickety dramatic framework. “But only these men know the truth”.
Relying on his talented cast, compelling true crime premise, and brilliant performance from Johnny Depp, Scott Cooper has created a riveting and tense film that may toe a well-worn genre line – but toes it oh so well.
“The Mad Hatter is the Mad Hatter”.
“That’s why it was written, otherwise I would have never wrote the book”, said Weeks. Am I going to play Mordecai straight?
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“The sensational movie scene I saw yesterday did not accurately portray my neighbors or my neighborhood.” he wrote in the Herald at the time.
