Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Echoing previous reviews, 26 May 2007
Producing a definitive review is next to impossible as everyone on the net has their own opinions so here is my best shot lol; as a stand alone film The Departed IS a good effort by Scorsese. For the most part, the acting is believable and engaging although many people have remarked upon Wahlberg's performace as over-the-top and unnecessarily crude which I for one agree with. The cinematography is decent enough as are the technospec stuff but compared to the likes of Casino and Goodfellas; this isnnt in the same league by a long way although it remains a good 150 mins of solid entertainment.
Now the crux of the matter - with only 150mins I couldnt help but feel the writers tried to include too much of the story of the original Hong Kong trilogy and things move far too fast to be believable. I for one, preferred the back story of the younger cops finding their feet in Andrew Lau's trilogy rather than everything coming to a head in only a couple of months in the departed.
Oft criticisms were indeed the severe time compression and the amalgamation of the original 2 female characters (the innocent GF to Andy Lau plus Tony Leung's police psychiatist love interest) into only the one female role who has to interact with both Damon and Di Caprio and serve as both roles.
Andy Lau , who played Damons role in the original remarked that although he enjoyed the Hollywood re-do he didnt like the swearing (a point discussed in previous reviews) and the omission of many of the plot devices of the hong kong version.
to sum up, the departed is a flawed work that attemped to incorporate too much of the original's intrigue and suffers needlessly for it but if the thought of cantonese with subs is too much of a daunting preposition to see the originals, the departed is worthy of a viewing but it is not vintage Scorsese.
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Plenty of action but no depth, 1 May 2007
If you want to spend 145 minutes on fairly mindless entertainment then you could do worse than watch this film. It's slick, fast and has stylised violence in gangland Boston. If you want a bit more and you're expecting better of a director that made the iconic "Goodfellas" then you may end up disappointed as it never reaches those highs.
On the plus side it's entertaining enough as Martin Scorcese knows what he's doing when it comes to moving any plot from the storyboard to the take and there's lots of well-choreographed violence. Also, there are some very good support performances from Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone amongst others (most of the cast are "names" and have a great track record in films.)
On the minus side, for me, there's a whole stack of things. Standing out though you have Jack Nicholson (Costello) whose performance, to my mind, is somewhat over the top. Next down the line you have the plot (if you haven't seen the film yet and intend to then please skip the next paragraph's spoilers).
Costello's gang is infiltrated by a newly-enrolled cop (Leonardo di Caprio) and the "Staties" (a kind of elite police force in Boston) is infiltrated by the Costello gang in the shape of a newly-enrolled cop (Matt Damon). They do the whole informer thing, and both die in the end. Shootings, violence, bloodshed, more shootings, more violence, a few more shootings and there you go. I knew nothing of the plot before I saw the film and once I'd got it after the first few minutes the parallel infiltration idea seemed embarrassingly simple-minded (and it still does).
Also the very slickness of the film was off-putting. Just as "The Bourne Identity" made the Pierce Brosnan James Bond films look old-fashioned I think the real-world feel of something like "The Wire" has made "The Departed" look very 90s. By the way, if you like dramatic endings you'll get your money's worth because the film tries to end dramatically several times. Once you get to the final, final ending I, for one, had really had enough and laughed. All the way through, also, Leonardo di Caprio looked too young and Matt Damon looked too clean-cut. They might have been better swapping roles with each other.
More going against it than going for it, then? Well, yes, I think so. 3 stars I take as meaning OK, still worth seeing, but it's no classic.
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52 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Mediocrefellas, 12 Jan 2008
First time round I found The Departed a disappointingly average film, but on a second viewing it's clear I misjudged it: it really is a quite bad one. Scorsese's weaknesses as a storyteller have often been discussed, but he's not helped here by a remarkably poor and horrendously overpopulated script from the usually much more interesting William Monahan that at once dumbs down the original Infernal Affairs and simultaneously overcomplicates the storytelling. For all the additional characters and running time there's no grander design at work here to compensate. It may strain for grand opera but it simply comes across as off-key light operetta sung by people with sore throats.
The chief problem is the film's funereal pacing, which the clumsy editing and energetic camerawork increasingly fail to hide. The film takes forever to set up its plot - the film is half over before Matt Damon's undercover mobster who has worked his way into a Boston police task force is ordered to find himself - but never compensates by fleshing out the characters or adding any substance to the story. If anything, underneath all the bloat and bombast the film has seriously dumbed down the Infernal Affairs trilogy's underlying themes of identity, role playing and the need to find some kind of redemption in a world that requires you to be corrupt in order to live with yourself in some kind of peace. Instead, it's become a star vehicle in the worst sense of the phrase, where the central duo of police mole in the underworld and underworld mole in the police are effectively sidelined for so much of the picture that they almost become bit players.
Yet while we get seemingly endless and often incredibly long scenes of Jack Nicholson grandstanding, doing rat impersonations, waving sex toys around, insulting priests and generally impersonating Long John Silver as the cardboard mob moss, they really tell us nothing about either the character or the story. For all the constant repetition of his catchphrase "The point is," there simply is no point to most of these scenes other than padding out a minor supporting character (who in the original had no particular personal relationship with either main character) enough to attract an A-list actor and in the process unbalancing the film so much that he actually becomes the leading role. Scorsese has always shown a tendency to relentlessly hammer home the same point over and over again at great length despite making it perfectly well early in the film, and too many of Nicholson's scenes seem to be like hearing exactly the same joke very slightly paraphrased over and over and over again.
Unfortunately the problem isn't limited to Nicholson's resolutely unmenacing cartoonish villain. While both Leonardo DiCaprio and Damon (looking so much like James MacArthur that at times you keep on expecting Jack Lord to turn up and say "Book him, Dano") give stronger performances than their poorly written characters deserve, too many of the supporting roles have been beefed up or created purely to add more star power. There's no narrative reason for Ray Winstone or Mark Wahlberg's clichéd characters (do Nicholson and Martin Sheen's undercover chief really need sidekicks, especially when Wahlberg's mere presence makes the last act isolation of DiCaprio utterly nonsensical?), while characters like Alec Baldwin's Steve McGarrett figure just leave the film feeling horribly overpopulated with too many people competing for screentime at the expense of the story and what should have been the central duo's dilemma. Not that there's much dilemma left. DiCaprio's undercover cop fares best, but Damon's undercover crook is much less interesting than Andy Lau's equivalent in the original - no longer torn between playing a good cop and genuinely wanting to change and become the good person he pretends to be, he's reduced to a rather bland half-dimensional stereotype while the contrived and underdeveloped romantic triangle is straight out of 30s melodrama, not helped by Vera Farmiga's tendency to change her expression every syllable in what increasingly looks like an impersonation of Corinne Bohrer. With characters this thin it's hard to get involved in the film as more than a disinterested observer and consequently there's not even any tension to any of the setpieces - the surveillance operation that goes wrong tipping both sides off to the moles in their ranks, the failed attempt by one mole to identify another at the cinema or a warehouse shootout all fall surprisingly flat even as exercises in technique.
All this would be forgivable if the film was more interesting or even sporadically exciting, but sadly it's a very dull and drawn out affair that never justifies two-and-a-half hours of screen time. The original was a tight 100-minute thriller with a great pulp premise elevated by good writing and fine performances by two directors with barely a fraction of Scorsese's talent. There's absolutely no reason that it shouldn't have been the basis for a terrific American remake that could even have improved on the original, but sadly this is a case of far too much talent for the film's own good. Distinctly Mediocrefellas.
Extras are surprisingly light for a two disc set - some deleted scenes, a couple of short featurettes and a trailer.
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