Black Mass is a crime drama that details the actions of the notorious James "Whitey" Bulger, played by Johnny Depp, and his crooked relationship with the FBI. Bulger makes an "alliance" with John Conolly(Joel Egerton), an FBI agent determined to take down the Italian mafia in Boston. What ensues is a movie masquerading as a crime epic that, while on face value seems to be a solid movie, fails at establishing a true connection with its audience and seems to have something missing.
From an acting standpoint Black Mass is a terrific movie. It allows Johnny Depp to truly showcase his method-acting prowess for the first time in what feels like 20 Tim Burton collaborations ago. Kevin Bacon is very convincing in his role, while Egerton is also solid, though can sometimes go over-the-top with the Southie mouth gesticulations. This movie is also impeccably well shot and has a very sleek look despite the its rugged subject matter and setting. Overall, Black Mass is scene for scene a pretty solid flick, but this movie is so much less than the sum of its parts. Johnny Depp is clearly the driving force behind this movie but he is not a character you can even remotely root for. This made me look around and realize that no one in this movie is really worth rooting for. Egerton's character abandons his moral compass in the name of childhood bonds, Bulger's younger brother, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, hides his brother's transgressions to further his political agenda, and most of the other characters are Bulger's uninteresting henchman. There isn't one character the audience has any emotional stock in really. Granted, "good-guys" might be hard to come by in a gangster movie, but at least in movies like The Godfather or Goodfellas the audience is actually invested in the main character's story arc. Henry Hill and Michael Corleone are bad people, as shown by their violent crimes, but they maintain a sense of relatability and humanity that makes their characters truly interesting, and supportable by audiences. The same cannot be said for Depp's Bulger, who is cold, distant, and heartless, just like this movie really. Depp's performance was fantastic, but his character couldn't rescue the movie from its spotty storytelling and lack of an emotional core.
Black Mass wasn't even that eventful. There were a lot of wackings, and a lot of "business" deals but the movie was generally void of action. This is sad considering the material it had to work with. A large part of the story was the Feds' use of Bulger to eradicate the Italian mob, and this was barley fleshed out. Gang wars or espionage or other story lines could have sprung from this, but nothing materialized. Black Mass decided to focus on the relationship between Bulger and Conolly, characters who seemingly lacked chemistry and didn't really connect with the audience on an emotional level. Conolly could have been the movie's protagonist, but instead validated his spiral into corruption by repeatedly sharing the anecdote about how Bulger was nice to him as a kid... or something... It isn't really an interesting moral dilemma to be quite honest, and failed to make me care about Conolly at all. For all of its storytelling gaffes, the worst offense was by far the movie's tacked on ending. Black Mass decided to go the "this happened, then this happened and then this happened" route, typing out the story's resolution in typewriter font rather than making each character's demise a crucial part of the story, and actually on screen.
At its core, Black Mass empty and lacks a real punch. Each scene was well crafted, but the combined effort failed to make me care much about the story. This movie is void of characters that an audience can latch onto, and makes for a disappointing ride. As far as historical dramas go, priority no. 1 should be to make the story matter. By the end of Black Mass, I couldn't find really find the moral message behind it, I just kept wondering why it all mattered, and why it was all significant. These questions are still unanswered, and as a result Black Mass didn't leave a lasting impression, and was somewhat forgettable. Unlike great gangster movies, this one doesn't make you think, it doesn't linger in your brain and seemingly improve the more you think about its moral implications. This is likely because Black Mass doesn't have moral implications for audiences to analyze, and simply put, lacks heart.
C+