Movie Review: 'Black Mass'
By Bill Wine
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Johnny Depp is back in the underworld.
Having played real-life gangster John Dillinger in Public Enemies in 2009, Depp relocates to Boston to try on his reel-life criminal's hat once again in Black Mass.
Depp portrays congenitally manipulative and unpredictably murderous Irish-American mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, who rose to become the kingpin of organized crime in the South Boston underworld and eventually became an informant for the FBI for three decades so he could take down a Mafia family he felt was invading his turf.
For his involvement in 19 murders, the still-imprisoned Bulger, who was also the inspiration for the character played by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese's The Departed,would be sentenced in 2013 to two consecutive life sentences plus five years.
Joel Edgerton co-stars, playing FBI agent John Connolly, a childhood buddy of Bulger's whose career was completely entangled with his, and Benedict Cumberbatch plays Bulger's brother, Massachusetts state senator William "Billy" Bulger. But it's difficult to ignore the impression that we're seeing too much of the overindulged Edgerton and not enough of the underemployed Cumberbatch.
The plot thrust that demonstrates the way Connolly is able to keep the FBI off Bulger's back by singing his undeserved praises as an informant is the most fascinating and ironic aspect of the narrative, but it doesn't end up amounting to much.
Director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace) populates his film with a large and generally convincing supporting cast that includes Kevin Bacon, Dakota Johnson, Corey Stull, Peter Sarsgaard, Jesse Plemons, Adam Scott, David Harbour, Julianne Nicholson, Rory Cochrane, and Juno Temple.
But his misguided handling of the three principals keeps the film at a disappointing distance from us.
It's a showy lead role for Depp, but not one he commands in a productive way, and his scenes opposite Edgerton and Cumberbatch, which should be among the film's highlights, deliver too much information and not enough emotion.
The screenplay by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, which focuses on the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Bulger was rising to the top of the Irish-American Winter Hill Gang. is based on the 2001 novel, Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob, by former Boston Globe staffers Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill.
But there's too much on-the-nose dialogue and pure exposition and too little in the way of a narrative arc: that is, Bulger remains pretty much the same repellent, self-serving thug from beginning to end despite the occasional scene offered to humanize him. Maybe that's why we never stop noticing Depp's extravagant and transformative theatrical makeup.
Consequently, we're never engaged much beyond the point we would get to reading newspaper accounts and looking at photographs of the same material.
So we'll inform on 2 stars out of 4 for the biopic, Black Mass, an interesting but erratic examination of organized crime that could be a lot better organized.
