Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. I’ve got my own review of this one brewing, and I think I actually want to see it a second time before I write, something I don’t often do. I think it’s pretty great, though. I know that much. Here’s “Shutterghost” with his take on it:
I had the opportunity to watch ‘The Departed’ yesterday afternoon at a trade screening and I wanted to write in and give you guys some thoughts. I hope you are able to use this, I sent it to Harry, but i forgot that he was in the middle of FF. Well see what you think. (If from your talkbacks you know where I am from, please omit it) WARNING: Spoilers! I am not sure of when, but a friend put me on to your site around the time when a lot of your writers and contributors were going on and on about a new foreign film called Infernal Affairs. I decided to buy into the hype and checked it out. You weren’t wrong about this one! It was an intelligent, excellently paced crime drama. For anyone out there who doesn’t already know the plot, it breaks down like this: Jack Nicholson is a crime boss who dabbles in everything ‘criminal,’ nothing seems off limits to him. He mentors a young boy and inserts him into the police to be his personal informant. Around the same time, Martin Sheen puts his own ‘boy,’ a cop into Nicholson’s crew to sniff him out.When I heard that Scorsese was helming the remake, I wasn’t as excited as most. It seemed to be an all too familiar theme for him and he always goes on about not repeating himself, but when the full cast was announced, I was game. I work in the theater business. I don’t want to give too much away about myself. I love having the opportunity to see these films ahead of schedule, but I sneaked a peak at the roster, saw this one set for the 27th and cleared my schedule. It starts out with a voice-over and “Gimme Shelter” playing. Most of you probably know that from the article in this past Entertainment weekly, but it’s worth mentioning because Scorsese said that the theme of the song mirrored the theme of the movie. It just clicked for him! I am not calling him a liar, but I don’t think he understood the real theme from Infernal. Duality. It was obviously present with the two “cops,” but it also existed for the crime boss and the undercover cop’s commander. It was there with a few of the other characters as well, forming a backwards mirror effect covering the entire gamut of crime and justice. That is one of the many things that made Infernal so damn appealing. It is a hard one to pull off, but Infernal executed it brilliantly. Scorsese, instead of concentrating on the duality of the characters, opted instead for a father-son dynamic to be one of the central themes, attempting its own form of duality. Nicholson and Damon, and Sheen and DiCaprio are supposed to have this dynamic. It was laid on a little thick, which led me to believe that was his intention. But, he seemed to change ears, and only every once in awhile did he go back to it. The Departed didn’t seem to have a constant them driving the action. I can’t say for sure what really drove the action, I think it was, for Scorsese, being able to repeat himself and show everyone that he can still make violent crime movies along with the new boys in town(Tarrantino for example). It is very violent, but it almost seems like slapstick violence in the end. There is a girl who both Damon and DiCaprio are involved with that seems like it was attempting to pierce the duality theme, but came up short. I may be wrong, but I don’t remember the girlfriend being as pivotal to the story as she was in this. The story follows pretty much the same as Infernal, but it definitely isn’t the same. I’m not saying I wanted Scorsese’s rendition of Van Sant copying Psycho with this one, but he apparently saw a different movie than I did. As mentioned earlier, one of the things that made Infernal Affairs so damn good was the pacing. I never looked at my watch for fear of missing something. It hummed along, constantly adding meat to the story. Here, with The Departed, it has an incredibly uneven pace and bungles all of the suspense of the first one. Sometimes it was a play by play, as with the end and the order in which certain characters meet there demise, but there is no tension in its presentation of these deaths. Every once in awhile, I could see why he chose to do things slowly-he wanted to give Nicholson’s return to form as a villain as much screen time as needed. I was OK with that, until Nicholson in a dialogue with DiCaprio seemed to just lose all of the momentum his character had been building and just adlib on and on, making zero sense. Something was said, like “the boss is losing it,” but that seemed thrown in to justify Nicholson’s rantings. I didn’t hate it. Leonardo did a great job and Damon was oddly compelling as a snotty little weasel. The violence was amped up a bit, which for me is always a plus. Ray Winstone puts on another great performance. Baldwin and Sheen were doing Baldwin and Sheen.This brings me to Wahlberg. I may be wrong again, but I don’t remember his character at all. I won’t say how it ended but it involved Wahlberg’s extremely underdeveloped character doing something that made absolutely no sense. Who the hell was he? What is his motivation for doing what he does? He was such a pivotal character that it seemed to me to be of the utmost importance to explain as much as possible, but they didn’t. If you haven’t seen Infernal, I can almost guarantee that you will love The Departed. You won’t see anything coming and you won’t be comparing it to a far superior film. If used, I am Shutterghost
