Black Mass
Director: Scott Cooper
Talent: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson
Release Date: 26th November 2015
This film is the story of Whitey Bulger (Depp), the notorious Boston-Irish crime lord who turned FBI informant as a means of driving out the Mafia from his city, along with guaranteeing himself a sort of de facto immunity. Depp imbues the role with a quiet menace, complete with a prosthetic T-zone that renders him quite monstrous. However his performance, and the film with it, ultimately lack the depth or nuance to be memorable or affecting in any real sense. Which is to say that this is one note stuff, charting a familiarly Scorsese-esque gangland rags to riches to comeuppance narrative trajectory without any of the wit or charm that made Casino or Goodfellas great.
The casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as Whitey’s brother Billy is perhaps the most egregious symptom of the tin-eared production that plagues the film more generally. Watching him affect a Kennedy-style Bostonian drawl is a skin-crawling experience from which it is difficult to recover.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
