Review – The Departed

C’mon and give Scorsese his Oscar for cryin’ out loud. Otherwise he’ll never stop making movies like this. And he needs to stop. The world just simply doesn’t need another two and a half hours of ultra-macho gangster crap. Matt Damon plays a cop working as a mole for Irish mob boss Jack Nicholson, and Leonardo DiCaprio plays Damon’s opposite, a cop working undercover in Nicholson’s organization. Some of the violence was well-staged, which helped to offset the predictably heavy dose of homosexual panic that underlies almost everything in the whole picture. However, I was genuinely surprised by how terrible the script was. The macho posturing infects the dialogue so heavily that in places the characters don’t even seem to be talking to each other. Thus whatever potential this production might otherwise have had is swiftly undone by the terrible writing. Overall this comes across as Mean Streets slicked up and lobotomized for Hollywood consumption. Mildly amusing. [Note: they gave him his statue. Now let’s see if he stops.]