A Bland Look at the Underground Boston Mob Scene, Black Mass Fails to Make Use of a Powerhouse Performance from Johnny Depp.

Rating: 4/10 (5 November 2017)

I had gotten my hopes up for Black Mass, perhaps too high, when I heard Johnny Depp would be playing the lead role as infamous Boston gangster Whitey Bulger. Combined with director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) it was reasonable to think that Black Mass could be a triumphant return to Donnie Brasco form for Johnny Depp, and a strong gangster picture in its own right. Upon seeing the film, I was disappointed. Depp's Whitey Bulger lives up to the hype, but the movie around his performance never got me hooked.
Black Mass recalls a period of time in the mid 1970s when Irish Mob Boss Whitey Bulger began working with his brother, Billy Bulger (Benedict Cumberbatch) and FBI informant John Connely (Joel Edgerton), to take down the rival Mob families of Boston. Sure, it is an interesting true story, and Whitey Bulger is an interesting real life character, but the film struggles mightily to build a dramatic structure. This should be a movie about personalities, about betrayals and backstabbing. But Black Mass plays more like a documentary. It follows certain characters, but not intimately. Its players serve as parts used to explain the inner workings of the Irish Mob and the FBI. Not as individuals with their own feelings. In a documentary, there is an interest that comes from seeing the actual historical evidence of the story. In a crime drama, you have to do more. I never felt that Black Mass had anything of its own to say about Whitey Bulger, the Mob, or the FBI. The drama in Black Mass is incidental. All I saw was a film that tells me what happened, but not what it meant for anyone involved.
The reason Black Mass doesn't work is not because of the performances. Individually, there is some great acting on display. Edgerton and Cumberbatch are convincing as hard boiled Bostonians, and Kevin Bacon gives a performance reminiscent of his work in Mystic River. Depp, however, is the main attraction, and his Whitey Bulger is the first truly Oscar-worthy performance from him in years. Working with cold, blue eyes, he creates a ghostly, menacing figure that can stare at the screen and tell you more about his character than any amount of writing can. And that's a good thing, because Bulger is not much of a character on the page. According to the script, he's a bad-tempered wise guy, a la Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas. But that's it. Depp does all the heavy lifting. He fleshes out Bulger as much as possible, illustrating his fierce connection to his son as well as his hair trigger temper, but it's still not enough to save the film.
Black Mass is not a bad film, but it is a misguided one. There are good performances all around, and hints of strong filmmaking, but the movie never managed to grab me. Simply telling Whitey Bulger's story is not enough. With only an admirable Johnny Depp performance to differentiate it from the countless crime dramas that have come and gone in Hollywood, Black Mass is unfortunately forgettable.
43/100