Reheated affairs

Rating: 6/10 (21 March 2009)

Martin Scorcese has directed some fine movies, but his remake of 'Cape Fear' was amongst his weakest, a near-identical (and thus pointless) remake of the original. So news of 'The Departed', his version of 'Infernal Affairs', made me apprehensive. For those who don't know them, 'Infernal Affairs' and its two sequels, were brilliant films: violent yet cool, stylish but in no way shallow, and for a westerner like myself, interesting for their take on the Hong Kong underworld (a refreshing contrast to the over-familiar world of American gangsters). To be fair, in this case Scorcese has borrowed the plot elements but made his own film, a long way from a straight copy. Unfortuantly, he has also lost most of what was great about the originals. In the place of the cool, interesting world of Hong Kong, we have a very loud and direct movie full of wisecracking, foul-mouthed, ultra-macho American hard-men. Some of the writing made me squirm, it's not that the lines themselves are especially bad, but there's a depressing lack of originality in the way the script is constructed. Secondly, in the original movie, I cared for both leads, but in this film both Matt Damon and Leonardo di Caprio's characters (it's a starry cast all round, with a face you recognise in every role) are equally unappealing. And whereas the original movie dared start with the setup complete, leaving questions about how the plot got to this situation unanswered (at least until the sequel), Scorcese lacks the courage to do the same, walking us through the complete story in broadly chronological order, then adding some random, pointless minor time-shifting (the occasional scene shown out of sequence) as if in homage to his predecessor, while failing to understand the rationale of the device. The sad thing is that some of Scorcese's early movies, such as 'Mean Streets' and 'Taxi Driver', were as fresh and unexpected as 'Infernal Affairs' was; but in 'The Departed', he has reduced a classic to the Hollywood model of what a gangster film should be, and somehow won as Oscar for the achievement.