Log In


Reset Password
Film, TV and Streaming

Johnny Depp returns to form in the tepid crime drama 'Black Mass'

Johnny Depp delivers a frigid, dead-eyed performance as ruthless South Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger in “Black Mass,” a somber-toned dramatization of how Bulger manipulated the local FBI to become a pawn in his criminal game.

Director Scott Cooper does an admirable job of de-valorizing the kinds of characters that Martin Scorsese has made a career of colorfully mythologizing. But therein lies the rub: As a movie purposely lacking in the kind of sweep, brio and anthropological detail of crime dramas like “GoodFellas” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” cycle, “Black Mass” winds up being as dreary and mundane as the thugs and plug-uglies it’s about.

Many viewers probably know the rough contours of Bulger’s story. He became a beloved and feared figure in South Boston throughout the 1970s and 1980s, subsequently going on the lam for 16 years, until an anonymous tip led to his capture in 2011. He’s serving consecutive life sentences for racketeering and involvement in 11 murders.

Framed as the story told to prosecutors by Bulger’s former associate Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons),”Black Mass” is mostly told in flashback. The plot is set in motion when Bulger begins working with FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), an old neighbor and friend of Bulger’s brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), who at the time is a powerful state senator.

The psychological push-pull between the Bulger brothers and Connolly alone would provide “Black Mass” with a fascinating cat-and-mouse dynamic. Boys who once played cops and robbers on the playground, as one of them observes, are now playing them in real life. But Cooper, working from a script by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, keeps the story literal and linear, bouncing from a shot of Jimmy Bulger (no one in the know ever called him “Whitey”) tenderly helping an old lady with her groceries to a scene in which he casually shoots a colleague’s brains out on a deserted riverbank.

To Cooper’s credit, the violence in “Black Mass” is never depicted as anything but the sadistic, stupid venality that it is. But even with Depp working at the top of his game – blue contact lenses, slicked-back hair, cock-of-the-walk strut and rotten teeth included – Bulger remains a forbiddingly recessive figure. The film suggests that having been given 50 tabs of LSD during an early prison stint, as well as the loss of his young son, may explain why he became increasingly psychotic. (As for the child’s mother, played by Dakota Johnson, she disappears without a trace once the character has served her narrative purpose.) Those psychological speculations quickly evanesce in a narrative that spends relatively little time with its central protagonist, who remains a collection of tics and contradictions rather than a fully realized character.

Connolly, who had the idea of enlisting Bulger as an ally in eradicating the Italian mob in Boston’s North End, isn’t much more compelling. Looking puffy and punch-drunk, Edgerton uses “Black Mass” mostly to burnish his Southie drawl, as does a regrettably underused Cumberbatch. With f-bombs and rub-outs flying, comparisons to “GoodFellas” are inevitable, especially when Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang goes south to Florida to take charge of the jai alai gambling racket.

At this point, “Black Mass” takes on the predictable rhythms of a procedural we’ve seen before, with the familiar puffed-up male codes of honor, loyalty and aggression – minus the unique attributes of a story in which those same codes animate the collusion between criminals and law enforcement at its most breathtakingly cynical. For all its style, atmosphere and acting chops, “Black Mass” winds up being a respectable but unremarkable addition to a canon of films that for decades have depicted their protagonists as romanticized rebels and anti-heroes.

The bitter irony: What “Black Mass” gains in moral honesty, it loses in dramatic momentum. Even filmmakers and actors as fine as these haven’t managed to solve one of cinema’s most enduring challenges: making criminals interesting without exalting them. Rated R.



Reader Comments