I went to The Departed this weekend, which is an American bastardization of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. With that said, I recommend taking the $12 you would have spent at the theater and buying a copy of Infernal Affairs you can watch whenever you want. I bought my copy for $10 at Barnes & Noble. Spoilers follow.
I suppose I should explain exactly why I thought The Departed failed, since it's doing so well in the box office and in the reviews (93% on Rotten Tomatoes as I write). Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Sheen are the only two actors who garner any emotional attachment from the audience. Are we given a reason to care about or even like Matt Damon's character? Should we care about the skanky shrink and her unborn child (also known as the plot thread that was never resolved)? What was the abrasive Digham (played by Mark Wahlberg) doing during the half of the movie he was absent from? Sitting on his hands waiting for the story to resolve?
Scorsese fails to build the tension in certain (almost photo-copied but without the flair) key scenes, and it seems to me that so many details went underdeveloped.
This film reminds me of what's wrong with American consumers: Americans are constantly satisfied with less. It's what we get for eating donuts and drinking beer compared with pastries and wine. Eat an entire "death by chocolate" cake and it will still never be as satisfying as one Godiva chocolate. Someone fooled Americans into thinking that more language and violence makes a movie better. The gross decadence and low expectations of Americans are precisely why so many so-called blockbusters these days suck.
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2 comments:
Awesome review!
When a person who reads starts seeing how the book is translated to screen, they see how cruddy Hollywood is. I've hit two movies in the last year, and have read several dozens books. Books win over movies most days, Foreign movies are the exception.
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