The Departed Review

Scorsese takes the original's clean symmetry and roughs it up with Boston accents, Catholic guilt and an editing rhythm that never lets the audience settle. The construction is the pleasure: two men whose only job is to find each other, with phones as the primary weapon, and Schoonmaker cutting between them so the tension stays entirely informational. Leonardo DiCaprio does the best work of his early career here, playing Billy as a man being scraped away by the lie, all clenched jaw and unslept eyes.

Matt Damon plays Colin as a much more chilling thing, someone comfortable inside the fraud. William Monahan's dialogue is the standout, obscene and rhythmic, with Mark Wahlberg's Dignam handed the sharpest ammunition. Jack Nicholson goes bigger than the film requires and the Costello scenes tip toward vaudeville, which is the main cost. The last ten minutes have been argued about for twenty years, and the abruptness is the point, since the film has been about the arbitrary from the beginning. Ferocious, mean and enormously entertaining.