The Disappointed

Rating: 3/10 (25 November 2008)

Despite all the hype, the Oscars, and the good reviews on this site, I found the Departed a great disappointment. The story never for one moment captured my interest. There was not one character that I cared what happened to. And, as it seemed that most the actors were doing their jobs quite well, I assumed it was either story or direction that was the problem with the movie, or maybe both.
I found that the Departed suffers from Tough Talkitis. That is when all the characters speak to each other with such tough, rude, arrogant attitudes, it becomes unreal (like a cop show on Fox). Why? Because no people anywhere interact with each other that way in real life. It's a synthetic movie-acting manner that actors take on to project toughness into their roles. It is too fake.
DiCaprio and Damon do reasonably well in their over-tough parts, DiCaprio especially. Sheen is restrained. Wahlberg is particularly annoying as the police sergeant who never is for one moment human. He is smug and coarse. No doubt the director shaped that characterization. Worse than all is the outrageous hamming of Nicholson, a lifelong favorite of mine. I never believed him for a second in this role as some sort of serious Joker gangster. Alec Baldwin is very good in one of his small roles, which he seems to specialize in these days.
The story is humdrum and boring. I began looking at my watch about 15 minutes into this epic. There is no humor, even less character development, annoying side shows (the shrink girlfriend), and no real tension in the tale. After one hour and forty-five minutes of this, I realized that I did not care about what happened to any of these characters, nor did I care how the 'story' turned out. So I shut it off.
Three stars for a good try (stretching it!).