Good Movie That Could Have Been Great

Rating: 6/10 (12 March 2007)

Most of The Departed is engaging and taut, with undercover characters always teetering on the edge of having their true identities discovered by either the cops or the crooks, and those parts of the film make for good cinema. However (spoiler alert) when Frank Costello (Nicholson) is prematurely killed in a run-of-the-mill drug raid that looks like it came from a lackluster TV series, the film loses something extremely important, and becomes a lesser movie because of it. Costello's character was the evil engine that drove the film's mood of menace and foreboding. As long as he lived, our hero DiCaprio was in constant peril, and Costello's influence infused everything, from DiCaprio's dissembling to Damon's character's double- agent work in the police department, with significance. There could have been a great climax involving the two rats and the Big Cheese their world revolved around. Instead, the movie falls apart and just meanders to an ending involving a supporting character delivering the coup de grace that should have been DiCaprio's. It was almost as if the filmmakers realized how long the film was running and decided to wrap everything up with whatever characters they had left. All in all, it's better than most mainstream films you might happen to see, but it's not worthy of an Oscar.