A film that doesn't know what it wants to be

Rating: 5/10 (16 December 2015)

Would you write a love story without love? An action movie without action?
Then why do a film about a gangster without crime? Yet this is what Black Mass is. You might see a few murders being committed, but you never see what makes Whitey Bulger a gangster. You never understand what caused him to become one, or how he subsists. A few passing references to vending machines, some nonsense about the street value of loyalty (repeated about 20 times in case you didn't get it the first time) but nothing about the organised crime gang he leads, how its income is generated, the system behind it, its hierarchy.
The classics of this genre all adhered to this principle: show the crime, show the system. Casino, Goodfellas, The Departed, Scarface. What's good enough for them ought to be good enough for Black Mass, which strangely departs from the principle and offers nothing in exchange.
What's left is a disappointing mixture of characters and plots that fail to deliver any dramatic tension. In this context, the mis- casting of Cumberbatch and Bacon is even more blatant – but none is worse than that of Depp. He is not terrifying at all and his make-up is a constant distraction. The mascara is even flagrantly visible in some scenes. Even when he was committing awful acts of violence, he was not believable.
A very sad failure for what could have been a new classic gangster movie.