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Venerable director Martin Scorsese has decided to remake the slick Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs - and the result is The Departed, a lumbering, vociferous rendition now set in Boston, yet borrowing enough from the original to still feel derivative. While the Hong Kong product was stylish (and more importantly, efficient), the American one, being inflated by 50 minutes, is bloated and manages to be single-handedly derailed by Jack Nicholson’s expanded role. It’s an adequate remake, but for a Scorsese picture, “adequate” is a disappointment.
The Departed explores themes of betrayal and loyalty with a great premise: Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Nicholson) recruits young Colin Sullivan (played as an adult by Matt Damon) and steers him towards a the life of a long-term informant burrowed deep in the Massachusetts State Police, while Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his caustic-spouting partner Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) decides that Billy Costigan’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) righteousness and old family connections makes him the perfect double-agent to infiltrate Costello’s gang.
As screenwriting fate would have it, both rats become involved with the same woman, Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), each organization charges their respective rat to root out the other, and the ominous noose begins to tighten around all parties involved. The tension and intensity ratchets to palpable levels, boiling over in the most memorable, unexpected ways. These scenes are poignant as they are poetic - but they’re all lifted directly from the original with little independent innovation, except for amped up levels of profanity and violence to make it superficially Scorsese.
The acting is uniformly excellent, with special kudos to Leonardo DiCaprio for his terrific portrayal of a terrified, jittery mess of an undercover agent, relying on sedatives to keep from crumbling. Matt Damon’s Sullivan is refreshingly slimy while still being a pitifully helpless everyman, bound to the one fateful decision as a child. Jack Nicholson, however, is a let down - Costello is an overblown, unspectacular villain afforded far too much screen time than his character requires. He pontificates John Lennon’s tuba, fires off racial quips about the blacks and the Chinese, waves a severed hand around, quotes James Joyce, ad tedium - it’s mostly meaningless, though perhaps here the writing’s more at fault than the actor.
The Departed’s weakest link is clearly the script. The opening takes far too long to set up, being mired in a mess of red herrings and inconsequential subplots. The dialogue is consistently vulgar, in-your-face and makes several stabs at black comedy, which seems to works to offset the film’s overwhelming grimness. There’s a repeated motif of betrayal that works on several different layers, but it never really adds up to a cohesive whole.