Film Review: The Departed
This is Martin Scorsese’s stylish, entertaining but flawed remake of the classic Hong Kong cat and mouse thriller, Internal Affairs. The basic idea is that a gangster’s protege secretly joins the police force as an inside stooge while an undercover cop joins this gang in order to bring it down. Martin Scorsese has rewritten the Triad boss to be an Irish-American and Hong Kong has been transformed into Boston. He has done a good job at turning The Departed into an Irish American version of Goodfellas.
There is an impressive cast. Jack Nicholson is dazzling and outrageous as Costello the gangster boss and there are great performances by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg who are the honest policemen managing the undercover operation. Matt Damon does a good job as a preppy cop who is really Costello’s insider, but you rarely get a sense that he is ever troubled by his duplicitous role beyond the fact that he may get found out. Leonardo Decaprio does his best to portray a cop pretending to be a gangster. He grows a goatee, needs medication for anxiety and sometimes pistol whips innocent people, but you never forget that Leonardo Decaprio is pretending to be a cop impersonating a bad boy.
This film has some style. The violent action sequences are choreographed perfectly and Scorsese is great at using foul mouthed dialogue to give edginess to the script. This is a remake that will give the story a much wider Western audience, but it is not a patch on the original. Anthony Leung (of 2046 fame) gave an incredible performance as the undercover cop in the Hong Kong version. Unlike Decaprio, Leung looks dark, cool and edgy, which gives him half a chance to pass off a criminal. You also got a greater sense from the original that the two main characters have a deeper connection and respectfully see each other as being two sides of the same coin. Uncovering each other was treated like a high stakes game. Scorsese has chosen not to play out this subtle dynamic. Instead, you get a thrilling, faster finale that reminds me of stories that children write when they spend ages building up to a climax that ends so abruptly. The End!