AmateurMovieReviews.com

Like most movie fans, I pay almost as much attention to the director of a film as to the starring actors. The director can influence whether or not I want to see the movie regardless of the kinds of reviews it has received at the box office. For instance, Ang Lee and Steven Spielberg are very reliable directors that deliver an excellent product more often than not. Oliver Stone, on the other hand, is a director that I choose to avoid at all costs.

Martin Scorsese falls somewhere in the middle. While I've absolutely loved some of his movies (Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver), others have left me bored out of my mind (Gangs of New York, Bringing Out the Dead). So I wasn't sure what kind of reaction I'd have to his latest work The Departed.

The Departed is based on a highly successful Hong Kong film whose English title is Infernal Affairs. The cast list of The Departed reads like a Who's Who of Hollywood: Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin all lend the film incredible star power. With a cast like that, odds are good that the final cut would be well worth watching.

Nicholson stars as aging Boston mob boss Frank Costello. He's managed to avoid capture all these years by having well-placed informants in the police squad. In fact, he has recently succeeded in getting Colin Sullivan (Damon) firmly entrenched as a Massachusetts state trooper. Costello has groomed Sullivan since he was a young boy and basically can control every move he makes.

At the same time, the state troopers are busy placing an informant of their own, Billy Costigan (DiCaprio) among Costello's men. Costigan must go all in for the job. He even has to serve time in jail just to make his background more suitable for Costello's crew.

Both sides discover at around the same time that they have a mole in their midst, and the rest of the film deals with the way Costello and Sullivan try to sniff out Costigan while at the same time Queenan (Sheen), Dignam (Wahlberg), and Costigan try to find out which guy in the department is actually working for Costello. It's a gripping plot with plenty of powerful sequences and close calls.

In addition to all that, there's a subplot that involves a woman named Madolyn (Vera Farmiga). She's a psychiatrist at the police department, which brings her into contact with both Sullivan -- whom she ends up dating -- and Costigan.

But the real treat of this movie, at least for me, was watching the performances of all these great actors. Matt Damon switches gears a bit and plays a truly bad guy for, I believe, the first time in his career. I thought he was fantastic as Sullivan and really pulled off the two-faced balancing act rather well.

I was also pleasantly surprised by Leonardo DiCaprio's turn as Billy Costigan. I've always thought DiCaprio was a decent actor, but I never really noticed one of his performances before this. But he was so intense and gritty as Costigan that I couldn't help but be amazed at his performance. He is no longer the fresh-faced boy that played Jack Dawson in Titanic almost a decade ago. DiCaprio has definitely grown on me as an actor!

Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, and Alec Baldwin were all terrific in their supporting roles too. Sheen spent so many years playing President Bartlett on television's The West Wing that it's easy to forget that he's no stranger to the silver screen.

The only performance that I didn't particularly care for was Jack Nicholson's. There were many scenes in which his character was just plain weird (like when he met Sullivan at the adult theater) that it was hard for me to imagine that he was a notorious crime boss. I didn't see the original Infernal Affairs, so I don't know if the character's supposed to be that way or if that's Nicholson's doing. Either way, it was just too odd and made him stick out from the rest of the characters.

Overall, The Departed is a very good movie and is one that you should see while it's still in theaters!