Marking Point for Johnny Depp

Rating: 8/10 (29 November 2001)

Johnny Depp is truly one of the great actors of this generation. He's underrated sometimes, but he's up there in my book with Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson as being a really great actor. Whether it's a blockbuster movie like Edward Scissorhands or a more down to Earth movie like Donnie Brasco, he really gets into his roles and makes them totally believable. That's what Johnny Depp did with George Jung in the movie "Blow". Depp kept the Boston accent of Jung's throughout the movie, aged pretty well except for the very end where he was going on 50 and still had bleach blond hair, and made the audience believe that he had been selling drugs his entire life. Depp made Blow a great movie. At first, I thought this was going to be a movie like Boogie Nights about one giant orgy and the downside to it all. It wasn't. It was a fun movie at some parts, expecially the late 60's California scenes, and it was a fairly dramatic movie towards the end, when Jung is finally caught and sentenced to 60 years in prison. It does sort of follow the pattern that Goodfellas took, but it's a true story and a good one at that. The real George Jung, who was interviewed on camara and whose interview can be found on the DVD version of Blow, gave the movie a thumbs up and gave well-deserved Brownie Points to Depp. With that in mind, you know that the movie is good. The performances by Ray Liotta and Paul Reubins were very good also. However, the performance that was probably overrated was that of Penelope Cruz, who plays the Colombian-born, irresponsible party girl who Jung marries. Her performance, to me, was pretty unconvincing, and she was only in for the last quarter of the movie, despite her name being next to Depp's on the poster. She's okay, but that role should have gone to someone else not so glamourous and who's not on the cover of the Enquirer every day. Otherwise, a good movie. 8 out of 10 stars