Right award, wrong movie!

Rating: 3/10 (27 March 2007)

No film buffs or Scorsese fans are going to take my word for it, but here goes a warning I need to get off my chest: THE DEPARTED is a wretched way to slowly waste 2.5 hours of your life.
We get Marty's little auteur flourishes, all of which we've seen repeatedly since GOODFELLAS, sprinkled heavily over the blandest spaghetti bowl of a plot.
The actors don't lack for talent, but here they seem to have been directed to give flashy soliloquies and never actually interact with each other. The film is like a whole series of audition readings, where each actor is reading his part alone on a stage. There can't be much chemistry if each chemical is kept in its own test tube!
Jack reprises his Joker role, except here he was encouraged to ham it up a little more. That said, he's the only aspect of this train wreck that kept me from giving the film one star instead of three. (Sorry, Mr. Nicholson; it wasn't your fault.) Sure, sneer at me because Marty won the BD Oscar. I can only conclude that 2006 was a year weak enough to console him for being robbed when he made GOODFELLAS, a great film that he has been remaking over and over. But this version stinks, and its success at the Academy Awards just means we will get loads of copycats who think this is what they should be chasing.
OK, now go ahead and waste your time watching it.