Strictly for Fans of Exploding Heads and Naughty Words; Otherwise, a Complete Bore

Rating: 1/10 (26 June 2007)

"The Departed" is garbage.
I don't care how many awards it got. I don't care if Martin Scorcese is such a capital J Genius that his feet don't stink. I don't care if critics reached for their thesauruses in competition for synonyms for "Brilliant!" "The Departed"'s appeal is strictly to those who like watching heads explode on camera and think that if a movie uses every naughty word in the book -- in every line -- that makes it deep and profound. Anyone who swallowed "The Departed" needs to have his stomach pumped.
Good grief. Shakespeare, the Greek tragedies, classics like "The Third Man" would be lost on these people. As would a truly fine movie from 2006, "The Lives of Others", beside which "The Departed" looks, at best, amateurish and adolescent.
I want my money back. And I saw this movie for free.
I was so bored I started rearranging the groceries in my bag about ten minutes in. I looked at my watch at least half a dozen times. I thought up drinking games you could play every time Jack Nicholson utters the word *&^%.
Several characters are shot -- or dropped -- to death on camera. A man's eyes are poked out. One character is reduced to a drug dependent, quivering wreck. I didn't care.
I was amazed at how much I didn't care. I thought about why. I examined the desert emptiness of the script, other than for its resplendently brandished naughty words; reflected that the plot was so bankrupt it could be in chapter 11; I noted how absent characterization was, except to mete out how often each character said %$#^, or his posture when exploding a head.
I pondered gossip column narratives involving Alec Baldwin and remembered how cute Mark Wahlberg was in that Calvin Klein ad; I wondered if Leo were still dating the model.
An hour into the marathon that was this Guantanamo torture, I realized that I had been so pounded into boredom and apathy that the only thing that would have aroused me was if the entire oh-so-manly cast were, suddenly, to don black net hose and stilettos, and sing the rest of their lines in Gilbert and Sullivan musical style.
I hoped against hope that Leslie Nielsen would appear and reveal the entire thing to be a very obscure farce whose humor would gel once Nielsen put it all into "Airplane"-esque perspective.
Was Martin Scorcese trying to prove his own manhood by creating a dystopic Disneyland in which every ride is manned by a cop or a mafioso exploding heads and blurting out swear words? Scorcese insults manhood worse than Andrea Dworkin.
As for art? I guess Scorcese never heard the phrase, "less is more." As it happens, I had just seen 1947's "The Third Man" the night before. "The Third Man" is black and white; its budget, compared to "The Departed"'s, was tiny. The cast, excepting Orson Welles, consisted of character actors or unknowns.
In "The Departed," Jack Nicholson, playing a Very Bad Man, toys with a severed human hand. What hits you is not the shock and awe the scene demands, but the pathos that the movie is so desperately needy for its audience to respond, and so without skill at provoking that response, that it resorts to the kind of gory tricks a Halloween prankster would pull.
In "The Third Man," Orson Welles delivers "the cuckoo clock speech." All he does is talk -- and what he says chilled me and frightened me so thoroughly I'll never forget it.
Now *that's* a classic film.
"The Departed"? Garbage.