Due to our fascination at people becoming a law unto themselves, gangster movies have always come along at a steady trickle. Mafia, Yakuza, London Gangsters, we seemingly just can’t get enough of watching bad people get rewarded for doing bad things while a selection of period appropriate needle drops play strategically throughout. However, while you could start your very own sub-genre from any one of the various criminal fraternities who have enjoyed their place on the big screen, there seems to be an extra special place in people’s hearts for Boston.
Martin Scorsese’s The Departed was a noticable entry as it blended that naturally cocky, famously nasal drawl into one of the finest crime movies of the 00s (rat in the final shot notwithstanding); and then in 2010, Ben Affleck took us to The Town, which offered up a doomed romance amidst the heists and gunfights. With Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, I guess we were hoping for a hat trick as we focused on the double dealing of infamous mobster Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger; but even with an impossibly loaded cast and Johnny Depp finally emerging from his whacky character phase, could Boston deliver us another wicked good crime epic?
The year is 1975, and small-time hood, James “Whitey” Bulger and his inner circle control most of the organised crime in South Boston despite being a beloved figure on the streets. Despite cutting a fiersome figure, he love his mom, dotes on his young son and has a good relationship with his younger brother, William, who is also a Massachusetts Senate President. However, that doesn’t mean that Jimmy won’t kill you as soon as look at you if the mood takes him, but recently he’s been noticing that he’s in danger of losing ground to members of the New England Mafia Family based in the North-End.
Enter FBI agent John Connolly, a man who grew up a “Southie” in awe of Bulger and who has returned to his hometown in order to make the mobster a rather bizarre offer. In exchange of turning Jimmy into an informer for the Bureau and offering up vital details to help him remove the Mafia, Connolly will ensure his peers turn a blind eye to any criminal centure that Whitey embarks on, just as long as he stays away from drugs and avoids killing people.
Of course, Bulger has no intention of sticking to his end of the bargin and after a personal tragedy unheaves his life, he starts to use a fanboying Connolly and the FBI as a tool to help him not only eradicate his competition, but provide a smokescreen that allows him to expand his criminal empire with virtual immunity. As the bodies pile up, Connolly still can’t shake the idea that Bulger is living his life to a code of honor, utterly blinded to the fact that he’s being played like a big, starry-eyed guitar. But how far can Jimmy push that luck of his before Connolly’s superiors figure out that there’s something more rotten than usual in the city of Boston.
In many ways, Black Mass is much like the on-screen figure of “Whitey” Bulger himself – on the surface he seems to be an unbelievably solid, stand up sort of guy who proves to be a bit intense, and certainly prone to violence. However, once we dig beneath the charismatic hold he seems to have on people, we discover that Scott Cooper’s crime epic seems to have more than the odd screw loose which goes on to provide multiple issues as the movie goes on. However, one thing you can’t deny is that, thanks to 2015 prices, Cooper has managed to whip together an undoubtedly stellar cast that provides an “oh shit, I’d forgotten they were in this” response roughly every fifteen minutes. But despite the familiar faces and a typically transformative performance from Depp, this overabundance of talent is unable to make Black Mass a strangely uneventful prospect.
Bizarrely, one of the problems the film has is that the influx of famous faces ends up being pretty distracting, meaning that while you should be burrowing into the core of the story, your attention is constantly snatched away as you turn to anyone within earshot as say “oh, I didn’t know *INSERT FAMOUS NAME HERE* was in this”. You can’t deny that the assembling of (deep breath) Depp, Joel Edgerton, Dakota Johnson, Kevin Bacon, Benedict Cumberbatch, Peter Sarsgaard, Juno Temple, Jesse Plemons, David Harbour, Corey Stoll and Adam Scott is an eye catching cast, but it also leads to a fair bit of frustration as talented actors breeze in and out of the film when you want them to stay longer. For example, you’d think that Jesse Plemons’ henchman is lined up for a more substantial role than what he actually gets and likewise, Johnson, Sarsgaard and Temple are really only glorified cameos which makes their casting more confusing than anything – I mean, why would you waste Jesse Plemons?
Another issue curiously comes from Johnny Depp himself who thankfully took time out from playing a seemingly endless string of kooky weirdos to tackle a full-on, mature role for the first time in ages. However, while Depp certainly goes to town while portraying the dead-eyed Bulger, there’s a sense that he’s falling back on all the same tricks, gimmicks and habits he’s picked up playing Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka or the Mad Hatter. He’s good – but it’s about as natural as watching Ian McKellen beatbox and you can’t help but think that despite the more harsher tone, the prosthetic forehead, pasty skin, snaggle tooth and croaky voice are not really much different to all the weird looks he hid behind in his more sillier roles. It also feels that in an attempt to match him, Edgerton starts to chew the scenery a little too much, meaning that when the walls start closing in on his badge carrying sycophant, wonder how anyone belived him in the first place.
The final issue that afflicts Cooper’s epic is that while the striking cast and Depp’s sinister turn are all pretty eye-catching in their own right, they also prove to be much more noticable than the story, which is actually pretty flat considering just how fucking crazy these events truly are. But while Cooper keeps things far more subtle than some of his actors, maybe he should have opted to adopt some of the visual va-va voom of a Scorsese film or at least try and give us Ben Affleck’s connection with the main characters. Yes, Black Mass does all the things you’d want from a modern crime film – chilling executions, daring plots, end-of-film codas that tell you how long their prison sentences were – but in it’s attempts to show just how bad things can go when criminals throw words like honour and loyalty around, Black Mass only end up preaching to the converted.
Come for the cast list, stay for Depp’s croaky grandstanding – but ultimately Cooper’s takedown of honor among thieves doesn’t have the pizzazz to drag Black Mass into the same conversation as other, Boston-based crime stories. You need yourself a fix of solid, true-life gangster stuff complete with look-at-me performances, then Bulger will roundly see you through – but when it comes to staying power, Black Mass is most definitely pulling a whitey…
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