#The black masses xbox one movie#

He dotes on his young son and his elderly mom, and is proud of his younger brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch, in a smaller role than you'd expect). The film doesn't shy away from Whitey's evil deeds (anyone fearing the film was going to romanticize him needn't worry), but it also portrays him as a human being. Depp will most likely land an Oscar nomination for Black Mass, but will he win? It all depends on his competition in the coming months, but Hollywood loves a comeback story and the Depp/Bulger performance will certainly be the element of Black Mass that people will still be talking about most in a few months.

#The black masses xbox one movie#

If nothing else, Black Mass has made people excited to see a Johnny Depp movie again. It's still up in the air whether Black Mass will restore Depp's commercial standing, but his work here is a critical success for him in reestablishing himself as a serious actor and not the world's highest-paid birthday party clown or a live-action cartoon character. While his makeup sometimes draws too much attention to itself, especially those mesmerizing blue contacts, it nevertheless allows Depp to fully immerse himself in the most understated performance he's given since Donnie Brasco. Coiled, magnetic, frightening and seductive, Depp's Whitey Bulger is more like the serpent Kaa from The Jungle Book than he is your usual screen gangster. But this is a character study and performance piece first and foremost, with Cooper (himself an actor) drawing out of Depp his best performance in years. The film wisely avoids cliche Boston locations and establishing shots, and is at times insular and claustrophobic. Black Mass is.Ĭooper and his cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi capture the grit and feel not only of blue collar Boston (I'm a native), but also the aesthetic of the late '70s/early '80s films that are clearly inspiring them. It should be noted that while Jack Nicholson's gangster was modeled after Bulger, the film itself is a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs and not a straightforward chronicling of the Bulger/FBI saga. Speaking of Scorsese, much has been made (arguably too much so) of his film The Departed basically being the Whitey Bulger tale. While the film indulges in a few Scorsese-esque flourishes at times (seriously, there needs to be a moratorium on the use of Rolling Stones songs in non-Scorsese gangster movies), Black Mass is closer in spirit, look, and feel to a Sidney Lumet film (particularly the late director's corrupt cop films Prince of the City, Q&A, and Night Falls on Manhattan).

As directed by Scott Cooper (Out of the Furnace), Black Mass - adapted from the book by two Boston Globe reporters who helped expose the Bureau's devil's deal with Bulger - is a grim, tense character study that would be a requiem were it any darker and serious. However the deal worked, Bulger admits to being in bed with the FBI, who via Connolly and his colleague, Agent John Morris (David Harbour), allowed Whitey to run amok in Boston for twenty years, getting away with drug trafficking, extortion, and murders along the way. To this day, Bulger claims he only paid the FBI for information and that it was a one-sided relationship. And for two decades, from roughly 1975-95, the plan worked, especially in Whitey's favor as he rises to become the crime boss of Boston with the FBI having eliminated his Italian rivals. But Bulger, with Connolly's prodding, comes to view it as a business arrangement rather than informing, a chance for him to have the FBI eliminate his competition while simultaneously protecting him from law enforcement. For Bulger and other mobsters, being a rat is the lowest of the low and the penalty is a gruesome death (which we see Whitey mete out).