The Departed
When I was watching this film, the lady sitting next to me sighed "oh no" when something nasty happened. She said it quite a lot in the last ten minutes. Scorsese has assembled a fantastic cast (with the sad exception of Ray Winstone trying to do an Irish accent - does anyone remember Tom Cruise in Far and Away?), and most of them get butchered. It's the sort of film where, when the thugs catch the police captain on his own, they don't invite him to sit down for a nice game of dominos. "Oh no."It's a remake of Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs, but it's a better film. The original concentrates a lot on Tony Leung lounging around in a dark suit looking cool; in The Departed, Scorsese uses his tailor's eye to dress everyone as badly as possible - especially Jack Nicholson. The result is a much greater emphasis on characterisation and tough guy dialogue, so the film doesn't just warp your brain by making you keep up with the plot twists. It certainly suits Matt Damon's potato charm, and while I enjoyed Leonardo DiCaprio's performance a lot, there were certain moments where you felt he was in line for an Adam and Joe cuddly toy remake. Mark Wahlberg is also very good - he has the drill sergeant pathological belligerence thing down just fine. And it is a gold-plated fact that any film is better with a drill sergeant in it.
Oh, and Thelma Schoonmaker does an unbelievable job with the editing, particularly in the opening sequence. She won an Oscar for the Aviator and you can see her getting another here. This film is good, so much so that Martin Scorsese might just be able to pull off a remake of that international turkey par excellence, Infernal Affairs 2....
posted by Chairman Peyote @ 9:25 AM
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