Turgid

Rating: 5/10 (10 July 2016)

The movie is about James "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious Boston mob leader. It ought to be better than it is. The style and subject matter are chiefly from Martin Scorsese, just as the musical score borrows heavily from John Powell's score for "The Bourne Identity." There are several of Scorsese's familiar overhead shots of table tops, amusing scenes of Bulger playing gin rummy with his mother, and so forth.
I'll have to guess at why it doesn't entirely clear the bar. It's certainly not the subject matter, which has been a popular movie subject since the beginning of the talkies in the early 30s. Oh, we LOVE gangsters. The casting is flawed, for one thing. Johnny Depp looks rather like Bulger but he's so inexpressive that there's hardly any way of knowing what the character is feeling, especially since he lies so often. He wears the same expression whether he's kissing his son good-night or shooting a traitor in the back of the head.
Dakota Johnson looks sweet beyond comparison but it remains to be seen whether she has chops. The figure who is almost as central to the story as Bulger himself is Joel Edgerton, and he's not very convincing as an FBI agent. It's unpleasant to watch his character and listen to him. The whole movie is unpleasant. The opening shot is a close up of a battered, ugly, snotty, pitted face -- poor Jesse Plemons.
Since this is "based on a true story," we expect the narrative to be messy. That's life, right? But this story is sometimes hard to follow because the continuity is weak. Not by design, I don't think, as it was in Stanley Kubrick's work, but because the script was faulty.
What the movie DOES deliver on is gore. People are battered to death, blood splashing all over the place. People are constantly being shot, sometimes for reasons that are obscure. And they're almost all head shots, except for somebody like Peter Sarsgaard who gets riddled with bullets and dies shrieking with pain, rolling around in a parking lot. (Cf., Joe Pesci beaten to death with baseball bats in Scorsese's "Casino.") The FBI is involved in all this, one way or another, but they're hardly sympathetic figures.
The reliable Kevin Bacon emerges with his dignity intact as does Sarsgaard. It's curious to see Benedict Cumberbatch in an American movie. He's a fine actor, though his accent sounds generically urban rather than Bostonian. Nice location shooting, by the way.
It's not a bad film, not insulting, but it is sluggish and a little dull, uninspired except for the murder scenes.