3.5 stars (out of 5)
Johnny Depp has irked us all in recent years as he slides into hammy middle age, and yet this epic, factually-based drama from director Scott Cooper (a long way from Crazy Heart) features the star in a chilly performance free of his annoying comic quirks, as he plays one seriously scary motherfucker.
In the South Boston of 1975 we meet a series of characters telling the story of ‘Winter Hill Gang’ frontman James/Jimmy ‘Whitey’ Bulger (Depp), a feared crime lord JD portrays as a cruel figure whom we’re never quite allowed to psychoanalyse, understand or like. Jimmy’s brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch, who doesn’t look much like Depp, but never mind) is the state senator, and Jimmy’s childhood pal John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) is working for the FBI to bring down prominent Mafia dynasties in the city.
John hears that a particularly feared Mafia family plans to do in Jimmy and he alerts his old friend to the fact, and soon these two men are working together, with John turning a blind eye to Jimmy’s increasingly bigtime activities. There’s also a powerful suggestion that Jimmy’s ruthlessness and viciousness was exacerbated by terrible personal tragedy and his divorce from his wife Lindsey, who’s strongly played by 50 Shades Of Grey’s Dakota Johnson and proves to be one of the only significant female voices in what is an amazingly blokey movie, with Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard, Corey Stoll and others turning up to spray testosterone.
And, in keeping with the blokiness, this is an exceptionally violent picture too, although we’re not asked to revel in the excitement of it all but instead are unflinchingly shown the brutality (and lots of it). We’re also not invited to find Depp’s subhuman-looking Jimmy cool and funny (like Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas), and we leave fully convinced that the guy was a psychopathic scumbag.
I Wake Up Screening 