Black Mass
Don't Go! A Slack Mess
Gangster and FBI's infamous tryst.
"As far back as I remember, I always wanted to be a gangster". So begins the story of Henry Hill in classic flick Goodfellas, and judging by our perpetual fascination with on-screen crooks, he's wasn't the only one. For over a century, cinematic tales of violent, socio/psycho-pathic men successfully living outside of the law form an imbalanced proportion our most popular and renowned films, across a kaleidoscope of cultures. City of God (Brazil), Gommorah (Italy), Mesrine (France), Infernal Affairs (Hong Kong), Once Upon a Time in Mumbai (India), The Long Good Friday (UK), El Mariachi (Mexico); and of course the USA's brutal all-time classic, West Side Story - we all love prosperous and unconquerable drug/prostitute/gun-peddling murderous misogynists. Who wouldn't?!
Black Mass is the latest of Hollywood's organised crime offering. Based on the true story of South Bostonian, James "Whitey" Bulger (Johnny Depp, Public Enemies) (who the producers allege is the "the most notorious gangster in US history", obviously not having heard of Al Capone or, more egregiously, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson), the film chronicles his exploits in the 1970s. With the collusion of his childhood friend and FBI Agent, John Connelly (Joel Edgerton, The Gift), Bulger informed against his enemies to retain an ongoing level of impunity and immunity from prosecution, in return for inside information to help maintain his own criminal empire. All of this went on while his brother, Billy Bulger (Benedict Cumberbatch; The Imitation Game, August Osage County) was the President of the Massachusetts State Senate for a record-breaking eighteen years! It was all pretty messed up, and we are given snapshots of Whitey's crimes as they gradually built towards his inevitable downfall.
Clearly, there is plenty of potential in the story, and it has already had a fictional outing on screen. Jack Nicolson and Matt Damon's characters in one of the all time great gangster films - Scorsese's The Departed - were loosely based on Bulger and Connelly. This time, telling a version much closer to reality, offers a great opportunity to unveil the sordid and no doubt well-rehearsed incestuousness between crime-fighters, law-makers and criminals. Instead, we are given a depressing two-hour reconstruction of events which merely explain that Bulger and Connelly - now both convicted felons - were between them, (SPOILER ALERT!) murderers, miscreants and all round horrible bastards. In this respect, the trajectory of the men is only slightly less predictable than the outcome of Titanic. If, after about two-thirds of the film's, you haven't yet lost all enthusiasm for the characters, Bulger's strangulation of the under-age-prostitute-daughter of his his right-hand-man's-girlfriend (a right-hand-man who also happened to be sleeping with said under-age-prostitute-daughter) will almost certainly do the trick. Ugh.
The reason we (particularly in the case of men) like gangster films so much is not from an enjoyment of seeing repugnant crimes committed (hopefully), but rather the deep-rooted and complicated reasons behind the commission of those crimes by apparently charismatic people. Usually we find some common ground with the gangsters' motivation in our own selves (blind loyalty, fear of disempowerment, need for validation, mommy issues etc.) making us feel equal moments of power and discomfort in the idea that we could ever behave in the same way as them. Portraying the savagery is a provocative way of considering the entire human condition. For this to work as a piece of entertainment, we need to fear, pity, despise and admire these gangsters at once; impelled to will them on but eventually hoping for their ultimate self-destruction as fair castigation for their wrongdoing. Besides having a loose and unclear narrative, where Black Mass capitulates is in its failure to show the characters as having any of the depth that would make such a reaction possible. Watching egomaniacal men repeatedly and increasingly debase themselves only makes for a jading and unsavoury experience. It ends up being nothing more than a sequence of disjointed and meaningless violent scenes that barely probe into the causes of an astonishingly corrupt affair.
This all endures while Depp's make-up makes him look halfway between a shaved pigeon in a leather jacket with a botched facelift and a taut, sun-damaged scrotal sac with the ice blue eyes of an ageing werewolf. Edgerton's FBI agent Connelly should be the more interesting of the two main protagonists as his career and personal life unravel. But, with a script that relies on the most tediously obvious signposts to reveal his evolution from good guy to bad, Edgerton has little option other than to nervously sniffle or awkwardly bark his way through the movie. After Kevin Bacon (X-Men: First Class) makes an appearance as a hyperventilating FBI chief, and Peter Sarsgaard (Blue Jasmine) stumbles around as the unreliable, drug-taking reprobate who nearly "blew this whole thing wide open!" (or other stock American-guy phrase) the film becomes a borderline spoof, relying on exhausted caricatures and derivative clichés from far better movies than this. More dangerously, the longer it persists without any worthwhile exploration of the characters, the only ultimate outcome of Black Mass is to to glorify the acts of several deluded and abhorrent men through a glossy window, with cool music in the background. That is something that should not simply be ignored, but should be actively derided.
Don't go. Stay at home and watch any of fifty other gangster movies that actually have some slither of meaning to them.
Don't go. Stay at home and watch any of fifty other gangster movies that actually have some slither of meaning to them.