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First trailer. Holy shit.

Did the filmmakers use CGI in addition to makeup to alter Depp's face? He's looking distractedly like Benjamin Button at times in this preview.

I'd be in if there were more mustaches.

Professor Wagstaff wrote:Did the filmmakers use CGI in addition to makeup to alter Depp's face? He's looking distractedly like Benjamin Button at times in this preview.

I'm betting there is CGI involved in turning his brown eyes that blue. Perhaps some skin smoothing too.

I just watched it again, I have no idea what you're talking about.

I see nothing here that can't be achieved by just make up.

I like seeing Depp trying again but I'm mostly numb to these kinda movies nowadays. Will wait for the reviews.

Depp is good, quite creepy at times but he doesn't go over the top with it. I liked it a lot better than the rather underwhelming and rote Out of the Furnace. This isn't leaps and bounds ahead of it in originality, but the performances and writing put it squarely in the same league as the other Boston crime movies of the last decade, for what it's worth.

This is actually not too bad, but no masterpiece either. The fundamental problem is the script (by Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk): Scott Cooper is shackled to an arc that is determined to play out in the most predictable way possible, with Johnny Depp's Whitey Bulger going through the traditional rise-and-fall parabola we've seen done so much better before (and not just by Scorsese, which this is incredibly derivative of). Depp hits, at times, the terrifying psychotic notes required of him (such as his conversation with Julianne Nicholson), yet his character never goes anywhere: we hear in voiceover

Spoiler

after his child and mother die

that he changes, but it's never evident: he's always a malevolently cold gangster and Depp, underneath a thick layer of makeup, is occasionally one-note and, surprisingly, not too interesting. The most intriguing tangents - his connections with organised crime in Miami, giving weapons to the IRA - are simply brushed aside and not developed in the script's rigidity to being a Bawh-shtun crime thriller. In fact, in the film's second half, it is Joel Edgarton, as the FBI agent covering for Whitey, who is the most interesting. Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon and the rest of a large cast, are largely underused and Cooper reveals himself to be a capable but rather uninspired director. It's not a complete bust, but it travels down a road well-trodden.

When I saw it, I had the feeling it was less about making more dramatic a true story and more about being true to the story. After all, what already happened is intense enough. Having some indirect exposure to the production itself, it was confirmed that it was more important to get the history of it and be true to that. If everyone involved tried to do "let's make it like Goodfellas", then the audience would have complained about how short it fell of being Goodfellas. We already have Goodfellas. We don't need to do that one again. (And I've joked about The Wolf of Wall Street fulfilling that role of being a "Goodfellas remake".)

I thought it was well-done for what it was: a reenactment of things that occurred as a way to bring closure without trying to "make up a story" (what I like to call "the Adaptation. dilemma").

This was a fucking dreadful film, even as an in-flight captive audience dice roll. Johnny Depp is somewhere between an alien and a cartoon, never approaching anything resembling an actual human being - it's one of his worst performances, and I'm sad to point out that by now, that really is saying something. So few of these actors feel like people who've ever been to Boston for a day trip, let alone lived in it, and the idea of Depp and Benedict Cumberbatch being two hard-edged south Boston brothers is one of the funnier concepts I've seen attempted in a film in years. Which reminds me, a fun iMDB fact for you: The word "Southie" is uttered 1,572 times in Black Mass, far and away a record, and that includes Dennis Lehane adaptations!

That review is pretty spot on... I was less captive having waited to see it on HBO. So I mostly played with my phone, and wished I was watching Donnie Brasco or something...

I felt the same way with Barbershop 3...just instead wishing I was watching the other two movies or the goofy Queen Latifa one.