Good for thrills, but short on soul

Rating: 7/10 (16 October 2006)

As we all know from countless movies, cops and robbers are the heads and tails of a coin that always seems good for another flip, if the spin is sufficiently vigorous. But while this film has an interesting (if preposterous) premise of mirror-image moles in the Boston police and an Irish "mafia", and is well directed, acted, and photographed, I found it curiously unmoving. It is certainly far from the top of my list of favorites in the thriller/mystery genre. Puzzling over my unemotional state as I left the theater, I thought of The Departed in comparison to The Third Man, another movie with a mirrored pair of protagonists, and the thriller/mystery that is still at the top of my life list. DiCaprio and Damon as the cop-and-robber twins, and Vera Farmiga as the woman caught between them, could be compared favorably, as actors, to Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles, and Alida Valli, but the male characters in The Departed, unlike Holly Martins and Harry Lime in The Third Man, seem to learn very little from their conflicted loyalties as they ricochet from one violent event to another. Also, nothing happens, or can happen, between them, because they do not know one another, and even their final violent meeting is oddly devoid of drama. Only Farmiga's character learns anything, and it is a bleak lesson indeed. Nicholson's over-the-top mob boss is an entertaining Beelzebub, but actually a distraction from the main story. We certainly learn nothing new about evil from him.