Departed should have been DOA!

Rating: 1/10 (27 January 2007)

Geez, I'm a Martin Scorsese fan and I've enjoyed just about every one of his movies but "The Departed" was just a terrible piece of film work!
Granted the acting was superb but that is about where it ends for me! This has got to be one of the meanest and dark movies ever made by Scorsese... just over the top with characters that anyone would walk on the other side of the street to avoid!
When the movie goes out of its way to make our protagonist a victim and not allow him to get his life back, that's when it completely lost me! How much frigging realism do we need? He could have gotten the point across and not had Mark Whalberg's character be the only 'good' one left... all others were killed off! And, with Whalberg, you never liked him because of his attitude throughout the movie!
Damon was good and Nicholson was his usual scene stealer self and Leo was in a league all his own, but the movie went 30 minutes too long and the ending was too awful to enjoy! No escapism for me here, just a reminder that we have really bad people in the world and some of them have taken a pledge to 'Protect and Serve'!
This terrible piece of trash will get Scorsese his first Oscar because the Academy will award him more for his body of work than for this movie; I'm just afraid that once he wins, other filmmakers will feel the need to copy this movie's style and we'll see 100 clones of corrupt cops killing everyone that might remotely cross them! BLECH!