Connolly is a layered protagonist undergoing a spiritual crisis worthy of the Scorsese treatment, while Bulger is a taciturn antihero who, like Michael Mann’s men of action, only seems to speak in the imperative. The two form an interesting partnership, but Black Mass’s journalistic tenor doesn’t allow their relationship to achieve any sort of emotional grandeur. Connolly’s lies become a misguided attempt to achieve greatness, while Bulger’s are purely transactional in nature. Black Mass’s shrewdest decision is to contrast Edgerton’s antsy approach to Connolly’s double life with Depp’s tempered, clinical take on Bulger. As Connolly, Edgerton nails the unique hypersensitivity of Boston bravado, strutting around in tailored suits and meekly attempting to weasel out of every half-truth he’s caught peddling. Every conversation between Bulger and Connolly hinges explicitly on their shared heritage (hostility toward Italian-Americans is a running theme without a payoff), and Bulger’s power plays lay a moral burden on the government agent tasked to expose Bulger and act against his own community. Like any crime saga without a more potent thematic hook, the film’s relentlessly insular script, by Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk, dwells on themes of loyalty and fraternity. Earl Brown, Peter Sarsgaard) appear as partners and associates, but Whitey’s network of thugs feels as sparsely populated as Black Mass’s city streets. None lead to a good joke.) A few shots of money-counting machines constitute the glory of Whitey’s operation, and a handful of solid actors (Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, W. (There are repeated references to a turf war over vending machines, along with a stretch devoted to Bulger’s relationship with the owner of World Jai Alai. The film will teach casual viewers that Bulger made money by running drugs and guns and laundering money, but the nuts and bolts of his criminal empire are left to the imagination, perhaps because some of them are profoundly uncinematic. Though the film succeeds in conveying the “unholy alliance” between two cocksure Southie brethren, it fails to make much sense of the richly detailed, ethnically charged world they inhabited.īlack Mass is deeply invested in the mythology of the Bulger case, but doesn’t bother to explain much of it. agent who coaxed Bulger into becoming an informant while abetting the criminal’s rise to regional kingpin status. The film, which plays like a barrage of bullet points punctuated by a smattering of bullets, takes a dutiful approach to the evidence against James “Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp), the head of South Boston’s Winter Hill Gang, and John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), the F.B.I. It is, all told, an appropriate setting for the dour and dispassionate Black Mass, a lightly dramatized case file that’s structurally averse to world-building and psychological portraiture. In director Scott Cooper’s Boston, interiors fade into blackness, meetings happen in alleyways, and it always looks like it just stopped raining.
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