October 9, 2006

The Departed Review: Rat Race

By John Miller

If you can’t handle movies with lots of graphic violence, The Departed isn’t for you. Ditto if you only like feel-good movies. Everyone else, go see it now, and I mean RIGHT NOW.

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Oh, you’re still reading? Don’t worry. If you haven’t seen it, this review is spoiler-free.

Essentially, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is a battle of rats. Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a police informant, and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is an Irish mob informant working in the Massachusetts State Police Department. Costigan is tasked with bringing down the mob’s big cheese, Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson).

What ensues is a gripping 150 minutes of fabulous acting, spot-on direction, and gruesome violence. The film’s length may initially turn some off, but there truly isn’t a dull moment. You’ll have no idea how the story ends until it does.

More often than not, movies with an abundance of major stars fall short of expectations. Fortunately, The Departed’s outstanding cast delivers the goods.

Nicholson is incredible, capturing the diabolical and cutthroat nature of Costello perfectly. Normally, Jack’s charisma is irresistible, but as Costello, he is undeniably despicable. In Batman, Jack was a superb Joker, but he was too likable to hate. To me, his performance in The Departed is his best bad-guy role ever, blowing Jack Torrance in The Shining out of the water.

Damon, DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, and Martin Sheen are all great, but Mark Wahlberg almost steals the show. If I made a list of my favorite actors before seeing this movie, Marky Mark wouldn’t have made the cut; now I’d have to reconsider. Wahlberg plays Dignam, who is in some ways a bigger jerk than Costello despite being one of the good guys.

(By the way, can we just give Marty the damned Oscar already? How can someone who directed Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas have zilch from the Academy? It’s almost as bad as Buck O’Neil’s exclusion from the Baseball Hall of Fame.)

Finally, I want to emphasize the brutal violence again. Even I, a Grand Theft Auto fan, recoiled multiple times. Team America: World Police had to cut a few shots from its hysterical puppet-sex scene to avoid an NC-17 rating, but apparently, people getting their heads blown off is R-rated material. Frankly, it boggles my mind. Last time I checked, just about everyone has sex at some point.

Anyway, if you have the stomach for it, The Departed exceeds the hype. Go see it now. Seriously.