Black Mass

Synopsis: The true story of how James “Whitey’ Bulger (Johnny Depp), a violent criminal and an FBI informant, became the biggest mobster in South Boston during the 1980s and 90s.

Johnny Depp’s standard fairytale persona has worn thin in recent years with a series of uninspired films.  He definitely needed to try something different and though the grubby activities of a psychopathic hoodlum doesn’t strike one as the most inspired of choices, his turn as James “Whitey’ Bulger effectively demonstrates that he can do more than play variations of Peter Pan or Jack Sparrow.  As John Dillinger in 2009’s Public Enemies Depp also played a gangster but Michael Mann gave him the full romantic outsider hero treatment that barely created a wrinkle in his familiar screen persona.  Bulger on the other hand is a thoroughly nasty piece of work and with the help of heavy make-up (which rivals that of Steve Carrell in Foxcatcher) Depp’s trademark ageless twinkle disappears behind a mask of reptilian charm, his affable appeal transformed into cold malignancy. In one sense, as there's not a lot of dramatic depth to the character, it’s Depp exchanging one stereotype for another but it's no caricature either.

This is only the third film from actor-turned-director Scott Copper whose previous efforts were 2013’s Out Of The Furnace and 2009’s Crazy Heart, both of them strong films. Black Mass is also well made with a convincing recreation of the time and place of Bolger’s reign.  Performances are strong with Joel Edgerton providing strong support as the second male lead as John Connolly the FBI agent who comes up with the idea of enlisting Bolger to help take down his rivals, the Italian Mafia, only to become entangled in Bolger's web of evil.

There are, however, a couple of significant problems with the film.  One is the issue common to all films of this stripe and that is why would anyone want to inflict on themselves the sordid activities of a bunch of witless low-lives? As a history of a notoriously violent gangland criminal, Black Mass is a litany of beatings, stranglings and point-blank executions by badly-dressed thugs whose every breath involves the F-word. There are a couple of other strands to the film, that involving Bulger’s and his younger brother (a very different role for Benedict Cumberbatch), a state senator, and the relationship between Bulger and Connolly and their wives but these are underdeveloped in the first instance and simply evaporate in the second, leaving us with a very restricted field of interest.  

And this brings us to the second problem and that is that with its over-arching flashback structure as former accomplices who have turned state's witnesses relate Bulger’s history, the film plays like a low-lit, colour- desaturated version of Goodfellas. In a questionable move Cooper even reworks the classic “So you think I’m funny” scene between Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta from that film.

Black Mass is an impressively well-crafted film with a compelling against-type performance from Depp but despite that, too narrow in range and familiar in its ideas to be as likeable as one would want from such a top-drawer combination of talent.

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