Really bad. Really, really bad. $90 milllion of bad. Watch 'Infernal Affairs'.

Rating: 1/10 (31 August 2012)

'Awful' doesn't begin to describe this insulting, puerile, stupid waste of everybody's time. Do you hear, William Monahan? You wrote a script that is lamer than the massed teams of the 2012 Paralympics. Not one character in it is believable, engaging or sympathetic, not one word of dialog in it bears any relation to actual human speech patterns, and any semblance of plot is absolutely smothered in unnecessary, bloated, self-indulgent pretentiousness, disguised with profanity as the 'honest' language of the good old Oirish Boston Police Department.
Martin Scorsese, you directed a tiresome, overlong, overcomplicated mess. The only actor that comes out of 'The Departed' with any credit is Alec Baldwin because it's so obvious he doesn't take it seriously - he does a prototype of his '30 Rock' psycho-boss.
For the rest of the cast, they frown harder and harder as this extremely tedious film lurches to its anticlimactic conclusion, as if that would make a viewer any more interested in it. If Jack Nicholson, the scruffiest and most inept gang boss in cinema history, had been looking for the 'rat' in his gang, he could have chosen a worse candidate than Ray Winstone, whose American accent falls off somewhere west of Shepherds Bush. As it is, he fails to suspect anyone at all.
OK, so it was purely a money-making enterprise, and succeeded in that, but please; why could they not have fleeced their customers with a little good humour? Avoid this film like the plague - it's on cheap channel reruns at the moment (Aug 2012), and it is disgracefully badly written, poorly acted, and sloppily directed.
On the other hand, if you want to hear Dvorak's 'New World' (you know, the 'Hovis' ad) played on the bagpipes, which I am asked to believe is what the Boston Police play at all their funerals, fast forward to the end. Everybody but Mark Wahlberg gets shot. Monahan and Scorsese should have been.