One Negative Vote (Spoilers)

Rating: 4/10 (7 October 2006)

This movie is sensational 95% of the way through. Di Caprio, whose skills as an actor are grossly underrated, is sensational, Damon is very good, and Jack Nicholson is endurable. (It would be nice to see a movie in which a director actually controls him, as Roman Polanski did in Chinatown. He is over-the-top now in every role, and sometimes it jars as it did here.
Unfortunately, the 5 percent that fails is the last 5 percent of the movie. Did any of the critics who are extolling this movie notice that the ending is absolutely incoherent? Let me walk through it.
1. Costigan, the Di Caprio character, gives his girl friend an envelope that she is not supposed to open unless something happens to him. This is done with tremendous meaning and significance. It is, however, the last that is heard of the envelope.
2. Next, a cd arrives for her with an audio of an incriminating conversation between Sullivan (the Damon character) and Costello (Nicholson). Huh?? If Costigan was going to do this, why did he give her the envelope? And what became of it?
Costigan explains that it was Costello's practice always to make tapes of conversations and store them at his lawyer's office. Costigan stole them and made the cd he sent the girlfriend. Huh?? This is the first we have heard of the lawyer, or the office, or the tapes. Why would a gangster do this? More to the point, how did Costigan know of it? None of this is explained. It all develops totally out of the blue in the last ten minutes of the movie.
3. Next Costigan lures Sulliavn up to a rooftop, and cuffs him, announcing his intent to arrest him. Huh?? Why didn't he send these incriminating cd's to the DA, or the police chief, or the Boston Globe? If what Costigan wants to do is arrest, why on God's green earth does he not just walk into the police station and show this mountain of evidence to somebody?
More than this, Costigan has called to the scene a friend he went to the police academy with, with whom he exchanged a joke or two in one of the earliest scenes, two hours before. Huh?? Why him?? Why not Dignam (Mark Wahlberg's character) or - as mentioned - any regular police officer?
4. Costigan gets the cuffs on Sullivan, takes him down in an elevator, and without warning is shot through the head. Now you have to see the whole movie, but this is just script hari-kiri. As much as these Hollywood types like to flaunt their world-weary cynicism, this story requires a heroic ending. For two hours we have suffered along with Costigan, and di Caprio is really good. We do suffer. All of the emotional momentum is in that character's direction. There is an elementary principle of story telling violated here - you don't bump your protagonist off on a whim.
5. And boy, is this ever a whim. Costigan's killer turns out to be ANOTHER corrupt cop owned by Costello. Huh???? This movie is premised on the notion that there is ONE police mole, ONE gangster mole, and the two men are trying to find each other. We've been watching that story line unfold for two hours. The existence of a second insider throws doubt on nearly every scene that has gone before. (I am not going to go back and detail that point by point.) The second mole is so tangental that I could not recall him in a single scene before this sudden appearance.
I could go on and on, for there are a couple of other twists every bit as bizarre and out of the blue as the ones described. But it is late, and you get the idea. I had the sense that someone on the Scorsese team could not stomach the obvious ending, where Costigan gets some sort of vindication and the girl. Well, that would be old-fashioned, but there are story lines that demand it, and this is one of them. In any case, it would be better than the absurd mish-mash of a climax that completely destroys the value of this movie.