With September already more than midway through, gangster drama Black Mass begins the Oscar bait season in typically dull fashion.
In Black Mass, Johnny Depp plays infamous gangster Jimmy 'Whitey' Bulger, who rises in power in the Boston underground due to the cooperation of a friend in the FBI: John Connolly, played here by Joel Edgerton. A real-life criminal like Bulger could make for a fascinating story, and crime films have often been greatly successful, but this film fails to give any sort of reason to care about the events onscreen. Bulger and Connolly are our primary characters, but as these are the film's villains, the film needs to pull all the stops to make them fascinating. Unfortunately, it never does, and as a result there's little here to be invested in. Any halfway sympathetic character exists on the sidelines, being outside of the film's focus if not outright ignored.
Clearly, though, there must be a reason that Cooper made a film about Bulger in the first place, but what it might be is utterly unclear until the typical outro with text explaining what happened to the characters. Who was Bulger? Who was Connolly? Who was anyone involved in this? That isn't explained beyond the mildest, most generic, least interesting factors. Bulger loved his mother and his son. His brother was the mayor. He and Connolly grew up together. Connolly has a wife. Bulger is of the Irish mob, as opposed to the Mafia. Textbook stuff like that, containing no real insight and nothing of genuine interest to grasp on to. We know what these characters did, but we have no context as to why it even matters. From an outsider's perspective, it seems like a relatively unremarkable story about some random gangster's rise to power in a corrupt system. There's enough of those. What makes this one special?
Not a whole lot, it turns out. Visually, this is a fairly good-looking film, but although there's a distinct visual style, it's really just the stereotypical shadows and greys of crime movies like this. Moreover, it's never more than mildly pleasing to look at. Few shots are memorable, and fewer are genuinely meaningful. Oh sure, many affect a facsimile of depth, but they range from thematically hackneyed to transparently vacuous. This isn't really helped by the underwhelming nature of Cooper's direction. For all intents and purposes, he just leaves his actors onscreen to do whatever they want. This, ultimately, means that the admittedly fairly talented cast is forced to do what they will with the utterly tedious screenplay. There's a few half-hearted religious metaphors thrown in there, but really, that just drives home how thematically empty the film actually is. The few shots of Bulger in church seem to be driving towards a theme about evil that never comes to fruition, but it would probably not have been anything exciting even if it did surface.
Almost as much as the bland direction, the mediocrity of Black Mass is to be blamed on the screenwriters. Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth have created a series of limp dramatic sequences inhabited by flat, shallow characters saying sub-Scorcese lines that don't even come close to the pseudo-Scorcese of American Hustle, let alone the genuine article. Dialogue in films like this should pop. It should be riveting to see gangsters cursing at each other. Instead, line after line comes across as the movie trying too hard to emulate the success of much better films, and it might come down to the dull, flat tone of everything. The occasional burst of excitement brings with it a sense of whiplash, because for the most part, this is a dreary, dreary movie. It's constant seriousness grows oppressive, especially without much compelling beneath the surface, and it smothers any attempts at humour contained within the script. The atmosphere remains constant for long periods, resulting in scene after scene that feels the exact same.
Usually, little is actively offensive, but as a gangster movie, it's obvious that the events that play out aren't gonna be pretty. However, as a consequence of the sense of pointlessness created by the lacklustre direction and the pointless script, the uglier moments become unpleasant, often going on for too long and showing no obvious sense of purpose aside from making the audience uncomfortable. Particularly near the end, Bulger's endless series of misdeeds grows exhausting. Wy did we need to see him murdering that last snitch? Why did we need to see him kill the prostitute? Why did we need to see him act threatening towards Connolly's wife? The answer seems to be for the cynical purpose of disturbing the audience. Every female character here is a prostitute, a wife, or a mother, and while the biopic nature of the film makes this poor representation a little more forgiveable, it does a disservice to the women who were involved in the real life story to have them reduced to accessories of the male characters.
At the very least, the performances are fairly solid. Johnny Depp inhabits the role of Bulger fairly well, even excelling at times in a sinister performance that doesn't fall into Depp's usual typecast role. Benedict Cumberbatch, playing Bulger's mayor brother, provides a strong performance as always, providing a surprisingly okay (if not brilliant) Boston accent. Everyone else emotes in their own feigned Boston accents, playing through the typical roles of these gangster movies, and there isn't really a bad seed in the bunch, but at the same time, Depp is the only performance that truly stands out, with Cumberbatch mostly being noticeable for his always-distinctive face and voice. It is Depp that keeps Black Mass watchable in its weakest moments, but he's never able to truly elevate the material beyond what it is.
Black Mass is, for all intents and purposes, a mediocre crime flick that's not likely to leave any lingering emotions one way or another. It's really just empty and vacuous, being occasionally diverting but mostly tedious, and occasionally unpleasantly ugly. There's little to really loathe it for, but there's not a lot to recommend it for either. Ultimately this is Oscar bait in the pejorative sense of the phrase, failing to leave a meaningful impact for all of its stylistic posturing. Tis the season.
5/10
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