Agonisingly ordinary, routine little cops and criminals piece which is best described as minor Scorsese.

Rating: 6/10 (23 December 2010)

The Departed is a curious thing: a Martin Scorsese concept movie. Here's a piece by the renowned director running on a sentence long pitch which reads something like: "there are these two fellas; one's an undercover cop pretending to work with the mob while the other's a mole employed by the mobsters mixing it with the cops" – there's your pitch, now run with it. I've nothing greatly against The Departed; it's a serviceable and workable enough little thriller which darts along at a merry old pace but it is an oddly cold; oddly distant; unmoving and strangely uninvolving piece, punctuated by individual 'moments' or 'bits' that take what has been a flagging film up to the respective point before consequently dragging it through a hedge in the proverbial maze thus onto another path entirely. Where Scorsese has dealt with the gangster genre in spits and spots before, namely Goodfellas and Casino, and done so in a manner that took us right to the brink in terms of either coming to side with the characters or despising them, The Departed chugs along with both its post-"24" and post-Bourne mannerisms as well as droll causality as it runs on a very specific premise plus routine character arcs. Where rather gloriously straddling that line between glamorisation and demonisation in the past, Scorsese has effectively relegated himself to mainstream fluff feigning to be about something whilst running on star power. In short, it is highly underwhelming and staggeringly average.
The two primary players of the film are Leonardo DiCaprio's Billy Costigan, a Boston police academy graduate hired by Martin Sheen's top police captain Oliver Queenan to go undercover for the department so as to spy on mobster Frank Costello (Nicholson); and Matt Damon's Colin Sullivan, another police academy graduate this time groomed by said mob boss from a very early age to go through the system and work on the inside of the police force for the crooks. Around this nifty little premise Scorsese effectively proves he can structure a few tense set pieces and create a tone of uncertainty and paranoia, predominantly from Costigan's perspective which is further aided by DiCaprio's performance of a man suffering certain emotions thus rousing the material at specific points. Little in the way of the duality they share is explored. Each men play roles within roles; both men are on the wrong side of a verbal battering from Mark Wahlberg's Staff Sergeant named Sean Dignam, Dicaprio more-so because we need the entire back-story of his life up to this point spelled out to us so as to know whom we're dealing with; and both men come to form relationships with Vera Farmiga's police psychiatrist Madolyn Madden.
For large chunks of the film, we don't get it; we don't understand. People charge and dart all over the screen going through what the overly complicated, under nourishing narrative demands of them; a similar sense of 'going through the motions' equally as apparent on the other side of the camera in Scorsese's directing. The plight of Costigan, this angry young man with parents whom are deceased and from a very limited background, and his inauguration into Costello's gang so that he may effectively risk even more by branching out into more serious things, is workmanlike; competent and quite taut. Costigan appears smart, too smart and has nothing to loose. As one individual recognises early on: "you can't trust a man with nothing to loose". Costigan's faux-boss in Costello, with his womanising attributes; casual cocaine use and analogies to bodily excretion embedded within his threats, is rightfully piggish and carries all the necessary traits required for us to accordingly despise him, although is played like a cartoon character and is difficult to take seriously. Costello's aid is a gangster named Mr. French, played by he-of-a-wavering-accent Ray Winstone; Winstone does his thing, a mixture of what he's done before in things like Nil by Mouth and what-have-you, and does it in his sleep.
The film uneasily cuts back and forth from DiCaprio and Damon, Damon of whom runs on a strand that isn't interesting and, dare I say, doesn't seem particularly necessary. Damon's cold, robotic expression throughout the film echoes the physical detachment we have from the film itself; when a time comes much later on for him to actually react to a quite incredible scenario, given the context, he has overseen - the sequence feels more grandeur and more incredible than it actually is because he's being asked to react to something; he's being asked to do something. Most of the dialogue in the film exists to advance whatever proceedings are required to move us all along; vacant are genuinely chilling moments of eerie realty, the likes of which might echo Travis Bickle's scociopathic monologue practises or long pauses on Jake LaMotta as he inhabits a locale, heaving and breathing - bordering on a fit of rage.
The sheer simplicity of it all is highlighted during one scene in which some of Costello's lesser goons stand around the entrance to a place of business randomly accusing passers by of being undercover, or "rats" – one of whom, in a jovial manner, is Di Caprio's character. The sequence is inter-cut with Damon's Sullivan sitting competently at a desk and computer frantically trying to run through whom of Costello's men might be untrustworthy, highlighting just how thoroughly more skilled one man is compared to many - yes, we gathered this ninety minutes ago. The Departed is scatty and detached, it's an alienating and frustrating film book-ended by individual bits and pieces that resonate; but if there's a reason they do, it's because droll story-telling is being momentarily interrupted by a moment which just 'happens', not because the film itself is especially engaging. Where many have lauded it and where The Academy itself buckled into rewarding Scorsese with the ultimate, it was merely dry and limp.