Johnny Depp miscast as Boston crime boss in Black Mass

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This article was published 17/09/2015 (4012 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We already know the story of Boston gangster James (Whitey) Bulger is the stuff of a classic mobster movie because it has already inspired one very good movie, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006). No less an actor than Jack Nicholson inhabited the kingpin role with his characteristically fiendish elan.

Much of that story was fiction however, a mash-up of true Boston crime and the 2002 Hong Kong undercover thriller Infernal Affairs.

Fortunately for director Scott Cooper (Into the Furnace), the true facts of Bulger’s career are as startling and compelling as the first two episodes of The Godfather, replete with crime, family, power, corruption, loyalty and treachery.

At its centre is an unholy alliance between Bulger (Johnny Depp) and FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), a South Boston guy from the neighbourhood, beholden to Whitey for his aid in a boyhood scrap.

Connolly registers as a guy star-struck by Bulger’s legend in the community. When the FBI makes a mission out of toppling the Italian organized-crime network in the city, Connolly suggests making an ally out of Bulger, turning him into an informant who will surreptitiously trip up the Mafia’s foothold in Boston. Connolly, desperate to make it work, exacts a promise out of Bulger that he at least won’t kill anybody.

Bulger doesn’t exactly keep that promise, but the devil’s bargain serves both men. Whitey secures a place for himself as an unassailable crime lord. And with his successful prosecution of the Mafia elements, Connolly’s star starts to rise within the agency.

In telling this story, Cooper makes a few smart moves, such as filming in many of the South Boston locations where the real story went down.

It is undoubtedly admirable that Cooper went into the film determined to show the central character for the remorseless sociopath he was. Cooper deliberately avoided the precedent of Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) in which Al Pacino’s ruthless thug was widely interpreted as the underdog hero in a hoodlum rags-to-riches story.

But in taking on that strategy, the film will live and breathe only if the star of the film succeeds in capturing the imagination with a big performance of equal parts charisma and menace.

You know… like Jack Nicholson.

Unfortunately, given the task of playing a non-cartoon character, Depp is no more up to the task than he was playing a brooding John Dillinger-with-exquisite-cheekbones in the 2009 misfire Public Enemies.

This time, at least, Depp looks less like Johnny Depp, with eerie, psycho-blue contact lenses, slicked-back hair and a sickly, snaggletoothed smile. But it’s a performance that simply doesn’t find purchase in credibility — all cosmetics, no foundation. It’s a state exacerbated by stunt-casting Benedict Cumberbatch as Whitey’s senator brother Billy Bulger. In their scenes together, it’s impossible to detect a whiff of history between them.

The usually excellent Australian actor Joel Edgerton is the third bit of miscasting, laying on Connolly’s arrogance with a trowel and coming off more as pimp than fed.

There is some excellent acting in here, mind you, almost all in the tiny roles: Peter Sarsgaard as coke-addled small-timer Brian Halloran, Juno Temple as a prostitute who gets in Whitey’s bad books and Adam Scott as a straitlaced fed, observing Connolly’s slow-motion downfall with watchful patience.

Otherwise, the fact-based Black Mass places as an also-ran next to The Departed, with its more fanciful spin on Bulger myth, proving the dictum found in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca