The Departed

We went to the cinema and saw The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s remake of Internal Affairs. I’m surprised it’s gotten such rave reviews (albeit mostly from guys who think ‘Fucking cool’ is a level-headed assessment of a film); I didn’t think it was much good. It was nicely made, with great cinematography, music, casting and acting (even DiCaprio worked well, though Nicholson was annoyingly over-the-top at times), but there were such problems with story, dialogue, pacing and underwhelming action sequences that I was disappointed. A good simple premise is developed well at first, but then rapidly becomes banal. The two moles don’t hatch clever plans to out each other – they rely on coincidence and the kind of situations that would reveal their true identities over and over again in real life. Death Note did the cat-and-mouse game so much better (though that of course was fantasy and could make up its own rules, therefore could get away with much lazier writing). The real problem, however, was that the characters were all so unlikeable, the different parts (especially the far-fetched love triangle) so irrelevant to one another, and the cool factor of Goodfellas or Mean Streets so lacking. I was moderately impressed, but certainly didn’t think much of it.