Slick and entertaining but no masterpiece

Rating: 6/10 (31 July 2008)

"Infernal Affairs" was a fun to watch but totally implausible thriller. It's no surprise that Martin Scorsese's remake is the same. The running time passes smoothly and it never jars in the way that so many Scorsese films do. After you've watched it though the questions start to pile up. The story is basically totally unbelievable and would work much better with a camper approach - John Woo achieved this with "Face/Off", a much more entertaining film, mostly due to inspired casting of Travolta and Cage, two actors who can make the best of ridiculousness. Here instead we get DiCaprio seemingly taking it all very seriously and Matt Damon being as dull as he is as Jason Bourne. On the plus side Scorsese remains a technical wizard, a wizardry though seemingly divorced from any insight or guiding intelligence, to the point that he seems to fail to notice the pulp nature of the material here.