So he cooks up the risky idea of recruiting Bulger as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in exchange for letting Whitey and his gang get away with their nefarious activities. Black Mass too often plays like a tribute to previous crime film, particularly Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but while it cops the stylistic licks and the attitude, there’s little of the telling detail or astute psychology.
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A Black Mass is a travesty of the Catholic Mass in worship of the devil.
Whitey Bulger is played in the film by Johnny Depp, virtually unrecognisable thanks to prosthetics. Depp may have top billing, but it is Connolly’s story, given emotional heft and moral complexity by Edgerton, that is most compelling. The partnership between Bulger and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the heart of the film.
Thus unravels twinned, typical antihero narratives spanning from 1975 to the 1990s, and largely framed as the remembrances of incarcerated acquaintances – errand boy Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons, The Homesman), assassin John Martorano (W. Earl Brown, TV’s True Detective) and right-hand man Steve Flemmi (Rory Cochrane, Oculus) among them – to police officers in order to negotiate more lenient sentences. They nail the aesthetic of the blue-collar South Boston without falling into the trap of showing off all of Boston’s most famous landmarks. However, moviegoers looking for the next great, Oscar-contending gangster film should not get their hopes up – even though “Black Mass” will please anyone looking for the visual staples of the genre, it fails to do much beyond simply going through the motions. There is no shortage of seedy bars and their dark back rooms as well as craggy shorelines accentuated with concrete skies. Depp’s emo riff on Frankenstein’s monster in Edward Scissorhands, his suitably deranged take on the great “bad” Hollywood filmmaker Ed Wood, and his manic portrayal of Hunter S. Thompson avatar Raoul Duke in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, all displayed an uncanny mastery of his verbal and physical toolkit, as he brought equal parts lunacy, humanity and authenticity to these cartoonish characters. In lesser hands, the role would have come off as cartoonish and cheap. In fact, most scenes with Depp held me invested just to see what his psychotic character would do next. The movie is as much about Connolly’s rise to power and fall as it is about Bulger’s.
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It’s complemented by an equally good performance from Australian actor Joel Edgerton as Federal Bureau of Investigation agent John Connolly. Depp, who is well-known for getting into character, collaborated with long-time make up artist Joel Harlow to physically become Bulger right down to his ice-blue eyes which are as cold and unflinching as a Boston winter night. Unfortunately these characters as well as few others aren’t fully developed. In the likes of a young prostitute (Juno Temple, Far From the Madding Crowd) trusting those who say they’ll protect her, a sweaty conspirator (Peter Sarsgaard, Night Moves) scared about escalating circumstances and a conflicted agent (David Harbour, A Walk Among the Tombstones) struggling with his choices, something more than reverence and routine colours the movie, if only for select scenes. These moments, while still effective, could have had a larger impact if the audience were more invested in these women.
