TMILN's 100 Favourites - 98

98. The Departed (2006)
Dir: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg

A policeman, working undercover in the Boston mafia, discovers there is a mafia mole within the police force and must work quickly to expose him before his own cover is blown.

Hollywood has been littered with remakes over the last decade with everything from TV shows to foreign horror movies to all-time classics getting the once over. The majority have been either forgettable or pointless but some have defied this trend, none more so that ‘The Departed’. Martin Scorsese, who finally won the long-deserved recognition of the Academy voters, moved the action of the Hong Kong action movie ‘Infernal Affairs’ (2002) to Boston and the result is tense, brutal and magnificent. Scorsese is back in the territory to which he is most associated – the crime thriller – and he displays all the assurance that made him the most revered director working in Hollywood today. Despite a running time of two and a half hours not a scene is wasted nor a plot twist unnecessary, and the tension is racked up with rare skill to each of the movies dramatic, often violent, climaxes. Scorsese is ably abetted by the cast with DiCaprio and Nicholson as assured in their performances as I’ve come to expect though it’s the supporting turns of Alec Baldwin and, in particular, Martin Sheen that stand out. Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg could easily have been lost amongst their more accomplished co-stars but both are impressive and hint at greater depths than they are usually employed to show on screen.