The Departed November 10, 2006

Personally, I’ve been removed from the film release loop recently due to the HSC and have basically not been up-to-date with all the anticipated movies of late 2006. Having said that, rumours of “The Departed”, directed by Martin Scorsese, as a Hollywood adaptation of my personal HK favourite, “Infernal Affairs”, had been floating around since the middle of last year. The original, directed by Andrew Lau and released in 2002 was an amazing piece of work, though the same cannot be said about the two subsequent sequels. “The Departed” adapts the trilogy into one film spanning almost 3 hours. Although it had the odd boring bits, it did meet my expectation of a brilliant film.

I’ve never been a big fan of Matt Damon and even less of a fan of Leonardo De Caprio (glued image of his Titanic debut with slick gelled-back hair – ugh) but both did good jobs in their roles – nice and natural, though Leo could have lost the beard…a tad outta character I thought. Best actor would’ve been Jack Nicholson – he’s a guy who can really pull off that villan act – followed closely by psychiatrist Vera Farmiga. First time I’ve seen her on the silver screen but definitely wouldn’t mind seeing her later roles.

It’s been too long since I watched the original trilogy so I can’t pinpoint any discrepancies but I did follow the movie quite easily so it wouldn’t have strayed to far away from the plot. It started off fairly boring but the midsection took off rapidly, if not a tad too fast as a result of cramming a trilogy into one film, and finished with an unexpected (oh-so-nihilistic!) climax. The light hearted humour left a good impression, especially any of the witty comments courtesy of Nicholson. For some it may be just a little on the gory and violent side of things, but it was a really enjoyable way to kick start my unofficial end of the HSC. Not much of a review but I’ll get better at this as I go along hopefully.

“Lies. Betrayal. Sacrifice. How far will you take it?”

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