Martin screwed up

Rating: 1/10 (11 February 2007)

The Departed, a movie by one of the best directors in the world, the one of great milestones of film history such as Taxi Driver, Good Fellas, Cape Fear, Casino, etc. So must be something worth, you think. Sorry to tell you: not at all.
The movie is interesting about movie language, meaning an editing very intense, which wants you not to elaborate what you see but tries to make you absorb it without thinking, which is definitely an important choice, something not easy to realize, something only a great director can do if he has the best professional people around him. As it often happens, when you try to build the pathos in such a way, you may loose the reality. That's what happens to the movie, to say the lesser problem of it.
So we have here a team of policemen who, for doing their daily job of fighting the crime, keep on treating each other very badly (to use an euphemism), keep on insulting each other and on punching each other every time there's a decision to be taken. Imagine if you should work in such a way in your office, if you should punch your colleague every time he has a different opinion from yours... And this is just for the beginning...
Later, in the most dramatic moments of the movie, you will hear the audience laughing. That's the best critic to a movie you can have. When you can't trust trailers and advertising (of course), when you can't trust interviews, reviews, box office result, Academy nominations and eventually awards, best signatures of the world... Than you have the only review everyone HAS to believe: the reaction of the audience. If they laugh, when they should be shaking on their armchair, that means something is wrong, something doesn't work. We saw something like that in The war of worlds, by another promising director named Steven Spielberg.
An explanation for that may be that Hollywood has to make movies. If the script is good or not, if it's a serious operation or not, there's a budget to be spent soon and they have to make the movie. In such cases the hope is that, maybe, during the shooting, the right idea will come out to solve that problem of the script. Well, this time the right idea didn't come out. And you'll find it out with surprise.
The movie has some qualities, as I said. We have some good acting performances, especially from Matt Damon, able even to show when he is lying, and in this I recognize the acting directions from Scorsese. Than we have Leonardo Di Caprio who, in order to get rid of his good-boy-face, has to tense all single muscles of his face in every scene...
Mr Scorsese may be running for 10 Oscars, he may have sold for 200 millions, but, together with the audience, we can say Martin, this time, you screwed up.