"This is to gangster films what Fury is to war films" -a friend

Rating: 2/10 (17 September 2015)

Even without taking into account the misleading advertising, this is still a complete disaster of a film. The writing is sloppy at best, the editing is downright horrific, the score is so bland that it seems to be dead set on ruining any chance that any scene has of showing any quality, and even the acting is frequently cringe-worthy. This is a film so overtly disorganized and lacking of vision that by watching it you get the feeling that it actually wants you to give up and watch something else.
The main attraction is Depp's performance, but for the entire second half of the film, he takes a screen time backseat to appease the very poorly cast Joel Edgerton, who despite being a fine actor in his own right, could not possibly do any good with a character that the audience could have witnessed in a small role in a single scene, and know just as much about as they do by the end of the movie. In fact, the same could be said for nearly every character. I learned nothing about Whitey Bulger that I didn't gather from the trailer for this movie.
Characters and plot lines come and go with no indication of significance because the film's main thematic focus appears to be the idea of using a bad guy to get other bad guys, and the ethical dilemmas that might surround such an agreement. The way it decides to convey this theme would be by having a scene where Joel Edgerton says that he needs Johnny Depp, and then one or more of his colleagues (or wife) either silently or loudly question his enthusiasm for the informant while new information is received to further enforce the illusion that there is anything here to actually invest in. Now repeat that scene about twenty or thirty times and you have the bulk of the movie, then throw some violent scenes in between with little to no context or reason to care and you have the rest, that is the rest that you will still be able to vaguely remember less than thirty minutes after finishing it.
But a script never makes or breaks a film; that responsibility lies in the editing. And my god, does this film have really, really bad editing. There is never any sense that the movie has an idea of what is going through the audience's head as they traverse through scene after scene of insultingly forced use of music (which is cookie-cutter enough already without taking center stage) and dreadful cutting. Things don't get prettier when looking at the pacing of the film from a broader perspective...it should not be clear WITHOUT researching a film that it can't decide who the protagonist should be (or if there should be one at all) or how much focus should be given to ANY character or ANY event. I'm not sure what went wrong because there's a lot of talent involved in this in both the cast and crew, but the final product here is a dull mess of a motion picture whose only redeeming qualities (a few entertaining moments and standout performances from Depp and Sarsgaard) are so outweighed by its flaws that it's really not even worth a glance.