Say Cheese!!!---Rat Traps.

Rating: Null/10 (24 December 2006)

Director Martin Scorsese gets back to the seamy mean streets of metropolitan America after a decade-long hiatus that took place after "Casino" was released in 1995 with this fiery and mean-spirited masterpiece that focuses on double agents attempting to infiltrate the inner-most sectors of those very groups they want to take down. Matt Damon is the bad guy in deep with the Massachusetts State Police and Leonardo DiCaprio is our hero who may drown in an abyss of crime and wrongdoings with sadistic Irish Mafia crime boss Jack Nicholson. We have law enforcement officials galore (Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg and Martin Sheen), evil henchmen (led by Ray Winstone) and even a female element (in psychiatrist Vera Farmiga, who gets torn between Damon and DiCaprio herself) in the tangled and winding mixture. William Monahan's script rises above most all other film noir-styled classics of the genre mainly due to the overwhelming star-power (led by Nicholson in arguably his best role since "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") and of course Scorsese's out of this world talents as a legendary American film-maker. Fast-moving, tense and devastatingly brilliant in most every way, "The Departed" is easily one of Scorsese's finest efforts and quite possibly the best film of 2006. Based on a Hong Kong product (titled "Infernal Affairs") of the same translation from 2002. 5 stars out of 5.