Ridiculously Over-hyped

Rating: 4/10 (26 February 2007)

Martin Scorcese's "The Departed" won the Oscar for Best Picture last night (2/25/07). Simply by that large achievement my review will be posted here, just to get off my chest a few personal opinions of this film.
This film by large was applauded by virtually every critic that has a area to express a view for movies. While that alone will not be enough to get me excited about a movie (especially nowadays), I am a big fan of Scorcese's work, particularly "Raging Bull", which I believe to be the best film to have come out in the last 25 years. So to say that I was looking forward to "The Departed", with it's dream male cast of Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Matt Damon (criminally overlooked for a Best Supporting Actor Nomination), Alec Baldwin, and Leonardo DiCaprio, would be a bit of an understatement.
To save some unnecessary details about the film (which, incidentally, if you look at any other reviews, you would have seen already), I will simply say that this film suffered from (largly):
Scatterbrained, attention-deficit disorder editing/screen writing, where the average scene seemed to be all of 14 seconds long, especially in the first 45 minutes...
Deriviative, plagiarized writing that Scorcese has done (much better) before. Gangster picture with violent, non-sensical action meaning nothing, and rapid-fire scenes with music loud and in your face (gee, haven't I heard that Rolling Stones song before?) Undeveloped, unlikeable lead character in DiCaprio. There is no substance to his character and doesn't receive on bit of concern from the audience-goer. Also, while he is a very capable actor, he is just still far too young looking to head a clearly very adult-natured film.
The only thing that saves this movie is the mildly-surprising ending and Matt Damon's unheralded work. He is truly a gifted actor and deserves more acclaim for his work.
4/10 rating.