Movie Review: Black Mass
Black Mass is not necessarily a bad mob film, but it’s a mob film too concerned with emulating the cool of other, better mob films to develop any real voice of its own. Director Scott Cooper clearly had Martin Scorsese on the brain as he put this film together, but Cooper brings none of his own creative intent to the table. David O. Russell recently aped Scorsese with even wilder abandon in American Hustle, but with more of a purpose – emulating the 1970s era his film 
was set in, and drawing a parallel between his con-man characters and today’s rampant economic corruption. Cooper’s film seems happy to coast on the assumption that his film will be Scorsese enough for us until the next actual Scorsese comes along.
Black Mass dramatizes the true story of notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp), focusing on his rise to mafia kingpin status from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Bulger’s main stepping-stone to prominence as depicted in the film is an unusually close relationship with the FBI, particularly the opportunistic young agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). Bulger agrees to act as Connolly’s informant in return for the FBI overlooking Bulger’s criminal activities, and in the process Connolly becomes as closely intertwined with those activities as any of Bulger’s actual lieutenants.
The film employs a crack ensemble of actors to paint a broad-ranging picture of Bulger’s operations and their consequences (Benedict Cumberbatch is particularly fine, deploying a flawless Boston accent as Bulger’s state senator brother). But while there may be breadth to the story, there is little depth to any of the characters, most importantly Bulger. Depp is clearly invested in this character – certainly more so than he has been in any of the string of cartoons he’s spent the last decade playing – but there’s little for him to sink his teeth into. We learn in a few scenes that Bulger is genuinely concerned about his young son, and Depp sells those moments well. But otherwise the film goes no deeper than portraying Bulger as a garden-variety psychopath. As a protagonist, he may be titillating, but he’s hardly compelling – and certainly not worth the energy Depp puts into playing him, buried behind a mass of makeup that’s often convincing but just as often looks like a Halloween mask.
Beyond Depp’s prosthetic accoutrements, a lack of authenticity pervades the film. The period costumes and set dressings are all there, but again the attention is largely focused on surface details. There’s no real energy, no sense of how these people actually talked or behaved or lived. And that’s where Cooper and writers Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk really miss the mark on their Scorsese emulation.
Scorsese has a feel for his characters as real people, largely because he grew up in the areas he was making movies about and knew actual people like the characters he was creating. But the creatives on Black Mass think of these characters primarily as crime-movie archetypes: The Psychopathic Mob Boss, The Corrupt FBI Agent, or The Long-Suffering Wife. All the energy and intrigue is provided not by the storytellers, but by the preexisting true story. Black Mass is not necessarily a bad mob film. There’s entertainment enough to engage you for two hours. But for all the prestige casting and fancy packaging, it’s a lot of empty calories.
Patrick Dunn
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