A great crime movie.

Rating: 8/10 (24 October 2006)

The Spoilers herein will pretty much give away the entire movie. Most of it can be inferred from the previews, but I will indeed wreck the ending for you.
This is a movie that is very good, but is not one that I am not sure how well I liked it, which essentially means that its probably not one I would watch a second time.
On the plus side, its has great acting, dialog, and very memorable characters. Damon and DiCaprio are both put in a very strong performance. And Jack Nicholson is very entertaining in his role, as is Mark Whalberg. The plot is interesting too. You have a mole in the police department trying to identify the under cover agent in the crime lords gang, while the agent in the gang tries to find the mole.
But the story in and of its self is not that interesting to me, mostly because it feels like it does not really resolve its story line. By the end of the movie, all the principle characters end up dead, but there is not climactic gun fight. The undercover agent is very suddenly shot in the head, and then those who were in a position to expose the Mole are also shot dead. And then finally the Mole is in turn shot by one of the officers who quit the force when the Mole demanded access to the undercover agents in the wake of the death of the head of the under cover department. While the ending does fit the circumstances quite nicely, the is just not that satisfying and ending. Rather then resolving the character plot lines, everyone is just shot, and the truth is never really revealed. I would have preferred to see either the Mole or the Agent survive.
Its hard to have a worthwhile ending, I think, when both the hero and the villain of the story end up dead and no one around them ends up knowing exactly why. I don't mind that the Mole gets killed at the end, but the ending would have been so much better if there were some on screen element explaining exactly why the ex-cop who killed him did so. For all the audience knows, he was murdered in cold blood out of a grudge having nothing to do with the central conflict of the story.
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