What a fantastic movie, that delivers on all of its promises. Everybody in a great cast delivers, Martin Sheen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Marky Mark, Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Vera Farmiga, and even Anthony Anderson were all absolutely captivating. After this and The Aviator, Leonardo DiCaprio may finally be done being the guy from Titanic. This is one of those films where for me all the twists and turns of the story and any meaning to be derived from it all faded to the background, and all that was left was being hauled through a wild ride, just mesmerized by the actors going through each individual scene. I could completely forget who all these people were and every other acting job they've ever done watching them in this film.
Based on those performances, if this is the movie that finally gets Martin Scorsese an Oscar, it won't be politics and pity (like Randy Newman's Oscar for Monsters, Inc). The use of music was also particularly cool, both in some of the selection and in the choice to blast it and then cut it off abruptly when dialogue took its place. The Dropkick Murphys cover of "I'm Shipping Up to Boston", half Irish-half punk, really set the tone for the whole film.
I don't remember the last time I saw such a violent film, not because it was wall-to-wall violence or graphic, but because of the frankness of it. The whole thing is a bloody tale about an Irish gang in south Boston, and the only works I've ever seen with this much senseless, violent tragedy were all Irish plays, so of course this screenplay was adapted by a guy named Monahan. To be fair, I've never seen Infernal Affairs, so I don't know how much of this is straight from the Hong Kong film, and how much is from the same wellspring of violence and loss that fueled W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge. It also makes me wonder how William Monahan's script for Kingdom of Heaven would have come out with better casting (David Thewlis and Siddig El Fadil excepted) and was aimed in a smarter, less commercial direction.
Some people in the audience were definitely not up to it though, so don't bring your dumb friends. The people who audibly yawned during any tense scene because they didn't understand what was going on, or giggled during any display of emotion, and laughed whenever anyone got shot, basically the people with no capacity to appreciate anything but broad physical comedy and melodrama and just came to see Jack Nicholson be all crazy, were notably disappointed. Several people filed out early, and this is a long film without a lot of roadsigns, so if a brutal Irish-american crime thriller doesn't sound like something you can immerse yourself in, skip it.
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