And so it begins, have fallen behind again!! The last month or so has been pretty manic with finishing up another year at school and trying to throw everything together for next year. To top it all off I tried to sit down to watch the Departed a couple of nights ago and was presented with yet another dodgy disk from Tescofilm... I'm not exactly delirious about the service they are offering me right now. In fact I was very nearly ready to cancel my subscription tonight as my laptop starting churning when I put the disk but it was rescued by my old trusty portable DVD player - I knew that would come in handy some day!
Anyway the film...
It's not the first time I have seen the Departed, and I liked it when I first saw it. Second viewing is probably needed though. I'm not sure right now if it is worthy to be in the Top100, it's certainly a good movie but I'm not sure it is one that I would say you have to watch. The premise of two people undercover, one in the police and one in a criminal gang is pretty clever, but I'm not sure how well Scorsese pulls it off. I would have loved to have seen them make it a bit more of surprise as to who was who - but then as we have established already I am a sucker for twists and turns in a movie.
The cast however is truly fantastic, and DiCaprio and Damon play their respective rolls really, really well. The angst of DiCaprio as he forced to go undercover and take part in more and more violent acts is so incredibly believably. Nicholson's performance reminds me of Heath Ledger as the Joker - slightly manic and you have no real idea of what he is going to do next. I do struggle however to see Jed Bartlett, I mean Martin Sheen as anything other than in his West Wing role!
I suppose for me the real disappointment is the ending. I remember reading about when they ran out of money on the Italian Job they threw together a cliff-hangar in the truest sense of the word. In the Departed is seems like they ran out of money and thought I know what we can do, let's just kill as many characters as possible in the shortest amount of time. Oh and one of the bit part characters who we introduced earlier on will turn up and make it all fit together so that people won't be too confused... To me this puts it on a par with Vanilla Sky's random elevator scene where the guy explains to Tom Cruise's character what it has all been about, because we are just too lazy to try to explain it any other way...
Good film, great cast, ridiculous ending... worth watching, probably not Top 100 material
Personally, I thought the worst bit of the film was the desire to splatter brains all over the scenes at the end. No need. We would have known they were dead without it.
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