The Departed (Widescreen Edition)
Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson and Mark Wahlberg star in Martin Scorsese's new crime drama "The Departed." "The Departed" is set in South Boston where the state police force is waging an all-out war to take down the city's top organized crime ring. The key is to end the reign of powerful mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) from the inside. A young rookie, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is assigned to infiltrate Costello's mob. While Billy is working to gain Costello's trust, another young cop, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is among a handful of elite officers whose mission is to bring Costello down. But what his superiors don't know is that Colin is working for Costello, keeping the crimeboss one step ahead of the police. Each man becomes deeply consumed by his double life, gathering information about the plans and counter-plans of the operation he has penetrated. But when it becomes clear to both the gangsters and the police that they have a mole in their midst, Billy and Colin find themselves in constant danger of being caught-and each must race to uncover the identity of the other man in time to save himself.
Martin Scorsese makes a welcome return to the mean streets (of Boston, in this case) with The Departed, hailed by many as Scorsese's best film since Casino. Since this crackling crime thriller is essentially a Scorsese-stamped remake of the acclaimed 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, the film was intensely scrutinized by devoted critics and cinephiles, and while Scorsese's intense filmmaking and all-star cast deserve ample acclaim, The Departed is also worthy of serious re-assessment, especially with regard to what some attentive viewers described as sloppy craftsmanship (!), notably in terms of mismatched shots and jagged continuity. But no matter where you fall on the Scorsese appreciation scale, there's no denying that The Departed is a signature piece of work from one of America's finest directors, designed for maximum impact with a breathtaking series of twists, turns, and violent surprises. It's an intricate cat-and-mouse game, but this time the cat and mouse are both moles: Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is an ambitious cop on the rise, planted in the Boston police force by criminal kingpin Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a hot-tempered police cadet who's been artificially disgraced and then planted into Costello's crime operation as a seemingly trustworthy soldier. As the multilayered plot unfolds (courtesy of a scorching adaptation by Kingdom of Heaven screenwriter William Monahan), Costigan and Sullivan conduct a volatile search for each other (they're essentially looking for "themselves") while simultaneously wooing the psychiatrist (Vera Farmiga) assigned to treat their crime-driven anxieties. Such convenient coincidences might sink a lesser film, but The Departed is so electrifying that you barely notice the plot-holes. And while Nicholson's profane swagger is too much "Jack" and not enough "Costello," he's still a joy to watch, especially in a film that's additionally energized by memorable (and frequently hilarious) supporting roles for Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg, and a host of other big-name performers. The Departed also makes clever and plot-dependent use of cell-phones, to the extent that it couldn't exist without them. Powered by Scorsese's trademark use of well-chosen soundtrack songs (from vintage rock to Puccini's operas), The Departed may not be perfect, but it's one helluva ride for moviegoers, proving popular enough to become the biggest box-office hit of Scorsese's commercially rocky career. --Jeff Shannon
The Departed (Widescreen Edition) Accessories
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The Departed (Widescreen Edition) Reviews
Everyone's performance is amazing. I think this movie has revived the genre that has largely been stagnating as of late. This and the Godfather are the two best gangster movies ever made. This and the movie it was based on are some of the best gangster movies ever made.
Here's what I liked: 1) the plot was not predictable (even for someone who usually foresees the end in the first 5 minutes of a movie), 2) Leonardo di Caprio was amazing, 3) Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson were great, 3) there were several twists.
This movie is not light and airy and fun. Then again, his character was supposed to be.
It's just not that kind of movie. This is a very violent movie and although I would rate it in my top 10 movies of all time, I will never see it again.
"The Departed" is not generally my type of movie, but it was well done.
My only criticism might be that Mark Wahlberg was a little over the top. It is intense, violent and masterfully told.
I really enjoyed the movie, but not the harsh ending. fighting it out in a poker hand, hide and seek. The gangsters are winning as this movie starts.
with death as the hole card. The acting and script are the best I have seen of this sort. The inside man is a young fellow who is ambitious for higher things.
The undercover cop should have thought twice before taking the assignment. This one is a real in and out of dirty cops and undercover cops. and there have been a whole lot of these dirty cop movies.
**** ½. Ever since 1997's Face, Ray Winstone has pretty much been the (no pun intended) face of the modern British gangster movie for me, the way Michael Caine was back in the seventies. Yeah, that's the entire setup. To put it bluntly, he got his money's worth. Nope.
I don't think DiCaprio has been this good since The Basketball Diaries, and Damon. The two moles are played by Scorsese regular Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, and as with the two moles in Infernal Affairs, they're subtly altered to look as alike as possible. (Why else would Scorsese pick this instead of, say, One Missed Call). The Departed shows Scorsese back with a vengeance. I'm almost hoping he tries another Asian remakeThe Bird People in China, maybe, of Miike's Triad Trilogy.
Problem is, no one over here's really heard of him all that much. And yet The Departed does, somehow, manage to be almost as good as the film that spawned it. He's never been this good. Really, the movie wouldn't be what it is without him, despite his being a relatively minor character. But if you think about it for even a few seconds, you can start seeing all the many, many places a really good scriptwriter can go with a setup like this. The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006).
(And from the in-development credits at IMDB, it looks like America has now cottoned to Ray Winstone. And rest assured, Siu Fao Mak and Felix Chong, who wrote the original script, are very good. This is good stuff, this is. One mole finds out about the other, but has no idea of his identity. If it's half this good it'll be worth seeing in the theaters.
Yeah, we're not even out of the first tenth of the cast list and Scorsese has probably set himself back seventy or eighty mil. (The bit with the ex-girlfriend is expanded upon somewhat, but the rest is faithful to the spirit, if not always the letter, of the original). It's about time). But Martin Scorsese, he knows from gangster flicks, and he goes for the best. One of the things I was really, really hoping would happen with Martin Scorsese's remake of the fantastic Asian film Infernal Affairs would be that Scorsese would try to make the film a little less confusing during the opening half-hour or so, when we have very little experience with these characters and are still liable to get them easily confused.
This surprised me, given both the level of accomplishment found in the vast majority of American remakes of Asian films, no matter who's at the helm, and the level of accomplishment found in Martin Scorsese's films of late. There's this air of coldness about him that's just perfect. If anything, The Departed's opening half-hour is even more confusing than that of Infernal Affairs, and I didn't even have a language barrier helping to confuse me. Oh, sure, a couple handfuls of Americans saw the wonderful Sexy Beast, and he's had a few minor roles on this side of the pond, but let's face it, Ray Winstone hasn't gotten a lot of quality face time in American theaters.
The premise can be related simply, but is in practice almost impossibly complex: a criminal organization and the police have both trained a mole and infiltrated the other's organization. He got it here. And to make things just a little more interesting, one mole is living with the other's ex-girlfriend. I wasn't sure Scorsese had it in him any more.
Winstone plays Jack Nicholson's right-hand man, a guy who can go from affable drunk to sadistic psycho in the space of a breath (yeah, you've met him in the form of Joe Pesci before, but Winstone's even better at it). Pushcart Prize winner William Monahan (Kingdom of Heaven), who adapted the original screenplay into English, did the right thing by, for the most part, simply getting out of the way and staying faithful to the original. Mark Wahlberg, Vera Farmiga, Alec Baldwin, Anthony Anderson, and a host of others all do fine work here as well, but there's one guy who really makes this movie for me, and that's Ray Winstone. The heads of the two organizations in question are Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen.
Of course, when you're Martin Scorsese, you pretty much have your pick of A-list addresses to stuff his screenplay with, and he goes all out here.
He becomes a mole for Frank, feeding him information on department activity in an attempt to prolong and save his enterprise. Colin Sullivan, on the other hand, groomed from a young age by Frank, becomes a sucessful trooper, right out of the academy. For his acting the the movie, I surely was not disappointed. Placed as a mole in Frank Costello's criminal enterprise, Billy Costigan was a young recruit, chosen by his superiors to infiltrate and ultimately take down the organization from the top. What follows is a stellar performance by the entire cast, with a story that is as intense, as it is violent, profane and shocking. Colin looks to Frank as the father figure, and Frank seems to take Billy under his wing as well.
One warning, the film clocks in over 2 hours, and you cannot miss a minute of it without being lost. Leonardo DiCaprio (Billy Costigan) and Matt Damon (Colin Sullivan) are both in very interesting roles, seemingly polar opposites, who actually have more in common than they would ever realize. However, even with the length of the movie, it doesn't ever seem to lag, I couldn't imagine that any of this movie should be cut. The Departed is a film with Mind-blowing plot variations and shocking revelations which culminates in a violent and stunning end. A very compelling, imaginative and true to life plot with an ending that will leave you in a stunned silence of contemplation. I picked up this film primarily because of the fact that one of my favorite actors (Jack Nicholson - Frank Costello) has a starring role in it.
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