Dully Departed

Rating: 4/10 (15 November 2006)

Scorcese is a wonderful director. I will always go and see a Scorcese movie and that's that. But this is a weak Scorcese movie. It is not a bad movie by any means. I mean, it engages your attention and you can watch it all the way through. But by Scorcese standards it is passable. Merely passable.
Apparently there isn't much to choose between the ItalianAmericans and IrishAmericans. So who cares that these people are IrishAmericans ? Apart from the accent they may just as well have been ItalianAmericans. Apparently there isn't much to choose between cops and crooks (although which of the two would you prefer to respond to your 911/999 calls ?), but the movie doesn't really bite the bullet on this. Really, it just takes a long convoluted route to saying: good guys win in THE END.
Considering the gory body count of people who get their heads blown off, this is dull, routine stuff. Going through the motions. Overlong. The attempted 'love interest' was borderline silly with both 'cop' and 'crook' falling for the same woman. It added nothing, it subtracted credibility. Better to have left it out altogether. What on earth was the point of that episode with the Chinese gang and the microprocessors ? Presumably it was some kind of reference to the original (which I haven't seen). All this communication by mobile phone stuff just seemed annoyingly modish (and surely not a secure means of communication for crooks who know they are under high-level surveillance). These bits and lots more could have been cut. It should really have been a 93 min movie not 150 min. The acting is non-descript at best, at times just plain naff: Nicholson badly over-indulges himself in a couple of scenes; Damon is as wooden as ever (he'll never match the best part he ever played - which was in 'Team America'); DiCaprio was the best but didn't have material of enough subtlety to work with - the psychological effects of being under deep cover like this is potentially fascinating. Again, the movie never really gets to grips with what it has taken on.
Whilst watching this movie I kept thinking this COULD have been a really good movie. And I was thinking: I must finally get around to seeing Infernal Affairs. I wonder whether Scorcese hasn't so much lost the plot these days as simply lost his place. Violence has been done bigger, smarter, wittier and more stylishly by Scorcese himself (Casino, GoodFellas) and the likes of Tarantino and Cronenberg and many others since. Likewise the blurred moral distinction between cops and crooks. And everybody knows there are far too many dubious re-makes these days. We don't need the likes of Scorcese wasting his talents on them as well.