OverRated Piece of Bad Fiction

Rating: 6/10 (1 March 2007)

Ironically, this was the only Best Picture nomination that I not viewed so I rented the day of the Acedamy Awards and played it after it had received the Best Picture Award. I was quite disappointed. If this was the best movie of 2006 then 2006 was really a down year for the movies, which it was. This movie is a piece of very distorted fiction like all of Scorsese movies Perhaps I lost my respect for the movie because the story began so badly. It was unreal as was much of the movie and hence it had no credibility which is often a characteristic of Martin Scorsese directed movies. It begins when Colin Sullivan who is fresh out of the police academy is immediately assigned as a detective. That doesn't happen in real life, no matter how good a cadet is. Police officers routinely spend at least one year and in most cases two years on probation as patrol officers so that they can learn the ropes. They are rookies. Making it worse, Sullivan is promoted to sergeant shortly after becoming a detective. Again, never happens.
The same is true of Billy Costigan, who graduates from the Police Academy at the same time as Sullivan. He is immediately assigned as an undercover cop. Never happen. Until he learns the ropes as a patrol officer, he is not going to find himself undercover. And while undercover, he shows an exceptional amount of sophistication that only an experienced police officer would show.
Next dumb thing, is the Police Captain in charge of Costigan goes to meet him alone, without any backup. If he was that stupid, he never would have made captain.
And Mob Chief Frank Costello executes two people on the edge of major airport runway in broad daylight where everyone on airplanes landing or taking off can see him. Yeah! Since when do Mob Chiefs do the executions? But it is a typical Scorsese scene and there are several such unreal scenes in the film.
I think that if anyone but Scorsese had directed this film it would have been a better film. My thought is that for sentimental reasons, the Academy wanted to give Scorsese an Oscar as director and that the voters had to give the movie an Oscar to justify the director's Oscar.