Pretty Good

Rating: 7/10 (19 September 2015)

Being from Boston, I am very familiar with Bulger's history and despicable behavior. I thought this movie was less about Bulger and more about Connelly, which wasn't something I anticipated from reading other reviews, seeing the trailers, etc.
They did show how vile and scary Bulger is, but parts of the story didn't go into enough depth to capture how truly horrible he was - there wasn't enough character build-up to really care about the victims. Even though they reference in passing the number of murders, and how he pushed drugs on teenagers, they didn't show that impact in the movie. This was the first movie about Bulger that vilified Connelly so much - they did a good job with that.
I was distracted by Johnny Depp's hairline and how ugly Jesse Plemons looked - his hair looked like a BAD hairpiece and the dark hair/pale skin/eyebrows gave him a really sickly/bizarre look. He's good at playing bad guys and looked so different than he did in Breaking Bad.
The Boston accents were good - which is something that can ruin a movie or TV show for me.
Everyone talked about how horribly violent the movie was. Maybe I was prepared for worse, but I didn't think it was as bad as the reviews said. More *sounds* when people were being killed, which made it graphic and uncomfortable, but the visuals weren't as bad as I expected. The whole story is violent and brutal - even though I am saying it was less graphic than I expected, it is not a movie that kids should see, it is disturbing - it is based on a true story, these things really happened.