The Departed

The Departed

That’s three best pictures in a row! Sure, it’s a remake, but it is a remake that is just fantastic and The Departed brought the cool back to American gangster films and even brought me back into Leonardo DiCaprio’s corner with his great performance. It’s a rollercoaster of a movie that goes at a hundred miles a minute and never lets down once – there is no lull and absolutely no downtime. It’s straight beat after beat and doesn’t stop to linger for even the slightest moment.

Recommendations: High Plains Drifter , Dalkomhan insaeng , Dial M for Murder

The Departed

This movie's status is as good as the title suggests

The Gist

Jack Nicholson sends Matt Damon into the police force as his mole. Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg does the same to Leonardo DiCaprio with the gangsters. Sounds familiar? A remake of Hong Kong's very excellent Infernal Affairs.

What Do I Think?

The screenwriters and producers took Alan Mak's script and rewrote it to suit the Boston settings that this film is in. Eastern elements, like praying with joss sticks and brotherhood swearing with Chinese tea were replaced with slow but steady character development in order to convince the audience of the movie's premise. It is essential. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak managed to snappily introduce and develop Andy Lau and Tony Leung's characters (with help from a montage) in less than five minutes. The Hong Kong audience bought it as they were already familiar with the triad world that they are usually fed with in cinemas. Martin Scorsese took half an hour with his own version, which was passable, in good storytelling.

After that, it was all disastrous. I felt it was remaking without a single sense of justice. The first one comes in when Matt Damon pretends to be a lawyer in order to get information from a gangster detained in the police department. I am not sure if the audience knew what was going on but I knew because I had seen IA.

Does William Monahan (the screenwriter) know what is the Morse code? This method that Tony Leung used to communicate with Anthony Wong was perhaps the logical and crucial element that defined the aesthetic value in IA. No, it is all taken out in TD. The scene where the police force is in an undisclosed location, trying to infiltrate Jack Nicholson's plan in order to catch him was done in one of the sloppiest manner I haver witnessed in cinema history. How can cell phones be allowed in the operation? In IA, viewers were amazed by the ways that Andy and Tony secretly communicated with their real bosses. In TD, I think the viewers could be too busy eating popcorn or check messages on the cell phones.


So many scenes that they replicated directly, Leo and psychiatrist Vera Farmiga, the wrong spelling on envelope, Damon and Nicholson in theatre scene and most of the ending sequences. Screenplay lifted directly but not entirely, leaving the necssary, stripping off all that is cool.

Thankfully both the leads managed to put in their own personas into their characters. Damon was wittier than Andy whilst Leo was the usual showy type of DiCaprio from most of his movies but his lines were not as funny as what Tony was given. Nicholson could win an award from his portrayal, which amplified Eric Tsang's cruelty and smirks many times. The superb Anthony Wong was divided into Martin Sheen and Mark Walhberg. Quantity is ok but quality is compromised because these two characters were quite wimpy, even Wahlberg's brutaly honest remarks (and sometimes hilarious) were out of place. However, I like his character, as he was cast against type. I was tired of seeing Mark Wahlberg act as Mark Wahlberg in all his movies.


Rating: 4/10

The one point in the four is for the good background music.

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Last updated: 2009-08-12 01:06:22 by joekhor