Good not great action movie

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2007)

The Departed is a cops and mobsters movie which garnered critical acclaim and a Best Picture award but after seeing it, I began to wonder why the other nominated films didn't win. Even though IMDb score is high, the public reaction seems divided. As an action flick, it's satisfies with lots of foul language, bloodshed, gunfire and enough violence to keep you awake. The plot centers around an Boston detective (Damon), an undercover cop (DiCaprio) and a mobster named Frank Costello (Nicholson). Each character is trying to sniff a "rat" out of their operation. That's what makes this movie so interesting. Damon starts out to be the good guy be he isn't. DiCaprio isn't really the bad guy either. Nicholson is the villain throughout, but he's also an FBI informant, which did not make sense to me, since his character murders people. Mark Wahlberg, plays a foul-mouthed wise-ass detective and he got a supporting actor nomination for this movie in which he has much less screen time than his other big co-stars. I stuck with this movie because I wanted to know who was going to get who first, and how they would do it, but sometimes the dialogue just stretched too long, and the movie itself seemed like it should have ended 20 minutes earlier. It's hard to sit through a movie and not have anyone to root for (I wanted Leo to get the rat at the police dept.), and it's really hard when the audience knows who the rat is but the characters on-screen are celebrating the rat's deceptive achievements. Now I kind of wished Little Miss Sunshine had won, but at least The Departed had an action movie's version of a happy ending,