Johnny Depp is a very talented actor. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who would disagree with that statement. But, it has been hard to stand by Depp's side as in the 2010's, he's been delving deeper into the makeup and weirdness and avoiding all things challenging. But forget Alice in Wonderland's Mad Hatter or the iconic Jack Sparrow. Depp is weird as hell and still coated in makeup for Scott Cooper's Whitey Bulger pic Black Mass, but you can see he's challenging himself. It's great.
Okay, it's not all great. Scott Cooper is a competent director of actors, and everything looks good onscreen, but it's hard to enjoy Black Mass when it feels like everything onscreen has been done before. Even the "family recipe" scene from the first trailer feels like it's trying to be the "funny how" scene from GoodFellas. Black Mass doesn't even touch GoodFellas or The Godfathers, but for what it is, it's a decently good watch.
Johnny Depp, as previously stated, is good. Many times he touches greatness. If anything holds him back from an all-timer of a performance, it's the material. Black Mass is unfocused in its storytelling. The only two characters that get any sort of fleshing out are Depp's Whitey Bulger, and Joel Edgerton's cowardly yet confident FBI man John Connelly. Edgerton is impressive; he really makes his inner turmoil of doing the right thing quite present. Connelly feels real. The material just makes Depp's Bulger feel more like a big bad wolf than a human. Bulger did not have to be a good guy, but it's hard to latch onto him at any point when he feels so distant.
It's an open secret that Black Mass had so much more to work with than what is onscreen. Sienna Miller was actually cut out of the film because he subplot allegedly did not fit into the film. Maybe her Boston accent was bad, but maybe her subplot really did not fit in. Black Mass feels surprisingly incomplete. I think a stronger film could be present if Cooper's gaze into Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang was more thorough.
(Many of the Winter Hill Gang members are seemingly foils for Bulger's loose cannon to fire at. It's troubling to watch the movie give title cards explaining the fates of many of the Gang's members when I have little to no idea what separates one from another. The Boston accents in the film were uniformly decent, I guess).
So Scott Cooper's Black Mass is no masterpiece, but it's good because of committed performances by Johnny Depp and Joel Edgerton that are certainly above the script. The story of Whitey Bulger deserves a better picture than this, but for now, this will suffice as the definitive Whitey picture.
6/10
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