To portray the legendary Boston gangster Whitey Bulger in Scott Cooper’s biopic Black Mass, Johnny Depp appears to have recalibrated his dials marked ‘WHIMSY’ and ‘SEETHING MENACE’ into the opposite of whatever positions they were in during Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. Depp’s recent output has been disappointing, to say the least, but those of us who have held out for a reappearance from the heartthrob Depp that thrilled audiences in the ’90s may soon be vindicated. Perhaps Depp finally got all of his bad-movie impulses out once and for all with his performance in Mortdecai earlier this year, and he’s now purified and prepared to start turning in some more substantial work.
In Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, Jack Nicholson played Irish hood Frank Costello, a character loosely based on Bulger during his reign of terror in Southie and the bordering neighborhoods. As such, there’s a bit of overlap between Depp’s performance and Nicholson’s (the first trailer aped Goodfellas with its unsettling, last-second just-joshin’ laughs, too), though it looks like Black Mass will be able to break out from the pack of lesser mob-movie imitators on the merits of its cast. The newly released trailer even provides a look at Dakota Johnson as Bulger paramour Lindsey Cyr, and so we’ll quit the chit-chat and cut right to the good stuff:
The trail of the tape
Title: Black Mass
Director: Scott Cooper
Screenwriter: Mark Mallouk, Jez Butterworth
Cast: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson
Release date: September 18, 2015
The entire trailer in one line of dialogue: “If nobody sees it, it didn’t happen.”
The entire trailer in one screengrab:
A tense scene of domestic turmoil. The battle for a child’s soul. In Dakota Johnson’s defense, yes, that’s pretty bad advice to give to a child. But none of the good advice for kids sounds quite as badass. “Hey, buddy. I need you to listen very carefully to what I’m saying, because there are lessons again and again through your whole life, and you gotta learn from these things, right? Always eat your carrots. Even if it’s the gross, mashed-up, watery kind. They’re good for you. Eat ’em.” Whitey Bulger doesn’t do mashed-up carrots.