Too Much Like A 60-Minutes Story With A Big Budget

Rating: 6/10 (13 January 2016)

After watching Black Mass one has a detached feeling. A feature length film about a real criminal who had a long reign of running a criminal enterprise should seek to invest the viewer into the events as well as the man, Black Mass seems more like a glimpse that never reels one in to the time, the crime, and, most importantly never exposes much about the central figures. You really do not know more than, say, what a 15-minute 60 Minutes expose would reveal.
The frustration begins with the use of Johnny Depp's James "Whitey" Bulger character. Depp does an excellent job of creating the image of Bulger, but somewhere the writers seem to gloss over what his reign of crime in Boston was actually costing in depravity and murder. It was a truly bizarre reign with a psychopathic Bulger controlling everything the FBI was pinning on the Mafia. How did a government agency with the power to clean up both The Mafia and Bulger get so used? Whatever was going on was somehow made possible by one John Connolly who for unknown reasons, other than what we're told is Southie loyalty, constructed a false story of Bulger being a high-value informant. One can only deduce Connally was, in reality, also a member of The Winter Hill Gang who idolized Bulger and ruined his life to "impress" the man. Joel Edgerton, like Depp, delivers shades of brilliance as Connolly only to be let down by what the writers glossed over. I simply think as viewers we aren't allowed to know these men in any revelatory way. Jesse Plemons portrayal, with limited screen time, as Bulger's lackey Kevin Weeks is far more revealing. We actually feel who he is a rough street kid without anything other than his devotion to Bulger. The same can be said for W. Earl Brown's dumb murdering thug Martorano and David Harbour's FBI agent John Morris as the we know better what kind of men these were even without lengthy development. It makes the omission of what and who Bulger and Connolly were all the more frustrating.
So, if you want to see Depp really bring Bulger to the full light of day you simply won't get that. One feels Depp had the goods, and was in the mindset, to do so, but the writers failed to use him properly. This was just a recreation of an extremely topical overview with A-list talent instead. For those with an avid interest it may still, however, be worth a watch, for others not so much.