Jack Nicholson takes over.

Rating: 8/10 (15 October 2006)

In The Departed, a legendary director came together with a legendary actor and the results will be, I'm sure, legendary. Legendary, I say, as a tribute to the gigantic excesses of possibly the greatest ego Hollywood has ever produced, Jack Nicholson.
Think about it, for a moment. The Departed features a stellar cast, including five of the best known actors working today: Nicholson, Dicaprio, Sheen, Wahlberg and Baldwin. Four of those five, including the hottest young actor in years, Dicaprio, subordinated their egos to the greater good of the project, headed by Marty, who has directed handfuls of the best known and most influential films of the last thirty years. One actor did not choose to subordinate his ego. One actor decided to turn The Departed into yet another tawdry and showy funeral monument for an acting career that died decades ago, dispelling the hopes for rebirth of his career that a few more nuanced recent performances have encouraged.
I read somewhere that Nicholson has boasted that he did no research for his character in The Departed. That's a funny thing to do, Jack, considering that The Departed is as wedded to the cultural specifics of its locale as any movie I've ever seen.
Many reviewers have complained that The Departed lacks the frenetic energy expected from a thriller, especially a thriller modeled on Infernal Affairs. I think they are missing the point, in that, while Marty blatantly teases us with thriller energy, backed up by the hard push of Boston irish punk, Marty's real point in The Departed seems to be that all the wild action of his cops and robbers ultimately sinks into a larger passivity, a miasmic sense that nothing positive can be accomplished, that no sacrifice and no outpouring of brutalism and violence can ultimately accomplish anything.
But if that point doesn't come across to viewers the way it should, the fault is ultimately Marty's. Marty, it was your job not to hire a one-man artistic trainwreck like Jack Nicholson, or to find a way to wring a great performance out of him if you did hire him. If you really believe that it takes a monster ego to play a monster ego, then please look back on Daniel Day Lewis' performance as Bill Butcher in Gangs of New York. The opposite is more likely to be true.
A train wreck performance needed a train wreck of a movie. The Departed has the former, by Nicholson, but isn't the latter.
I'm calling for a do-over. With more Boston irish punk, by the way!