Avis des critiques

Screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Englishman Jez Butterworth (yep), focusing on Bulger's criminal years and collusion with the FBI, write dialogue as if they sliced up a bunch of boilerplate gangster movie scripts, put the scraps in a hopper, and blindly grabbed... Awkward references to local sports teams and landmarks attempt to lend Black Mass a veneer of authenticity, but Cooper and Co.'s phony dullness makes one long for even the modest genre intrigue of something like Broken City.

We know that the film is set (and was, commendably, shot) in Boston, because the word "Southie" (Bulger's neighbourhood terrain) is said approximately as many times as "fuck" is in The Big Lebowski – the film generally takes similarly clunky pains to convince us of its veracity. And yet this is clearly a film that is making generic, unconvincing guesses about its subject and milieu.

This is still a very watchable movie, but it doesn't take off. It doesn't turn poignant (as, for instance, Donnie Brasco did, not to mention The Sopranos), and it doesn't escalate into anything truly shocking. Bulger has a few early quirks, but success flattens the character, prompting him to withdraw from the audience like he withdraws from his comrades. The whole film is just repeated variations on a few themes: killings, meetings, confrontations.

The screenplay is credited to a Midwesterner and an Englishman, and exhibits no grasp of Bostonian vernacular beyond a half-arsed usage of 'wicked' and references to the Red Sox. The director is Scott Cooper, who seemingly a lifetime ago managed to transcribe convincingly the feeling of the second-tier south-western honky-tonk milieu in Crazy Heart (2009) but who is entirely out of his depth here.

Yes, "Black Mass" is about gangsters, and William Bulger plays merely a supporting role, but not even mentioning the busing crisis in the course of the action would be akin to not mentioning the police assault on Rodney King and the resulting riots in Los Angeles in the course of "Straight Outta Compton.

Black Mass is an act of teamwork, but in the service of a single performance. Depp's Bulger is a remarkable creation, involving nearly two dozen credited makeup artists and the cowering of at least that many supporting players. Like James Cagney's gangster from White Heat, Bulger is a menacing, outsize figure obsessed with power and family values, and he casts a tall shadow over everyone with whom he comes into contact.

Generally, slavishly hitting Scorsesean music cues, Black Masslacks the title's implied mystique, the sort that Michael Mann's forgotten Public Enemies hauntingly captured… with Depp as Dillinger. In the cold, hard light of day—which Bulger seems to shoot out of his own eyes—it's a gangster film whose pageantry of intimidation gradually fades in memory, feeling less and less distinct than in the diverting moment.

The story of how Bulger, his partners and their henchmen grew in power and operated freely for decades sounds like incendiary movie material. But Scott Cooper's Black Mass, based on the book of the same name by first-rate Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, is a misfire: like a defective hollow-point bullet, it fails to expand when it enters your brain.

This is a leap forward for Cooper, whose last movie was 2013's Out of the Furnace, a testosterone-soaked tour de force of working-class phoniness. He's decided to be a stylist — which is something to be grateful for — but Out of the Furnace was full of bad style. This time, the declarative script, which has been credited to Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk, keeps the film on a moral tether.

All through Scott Cooper's impressive Black Mass, the subject of betrayal *informs* the film as much as its violent vindictiveness, which he depicts with admirable restraint. No matter that some casualties were merely *potential* witnesses, hypothetical rats; they become grist for the mill.

All of these details could accumulate energy and manic grace, but Cooper shoots and paces this thing thing like a funeral dirge, figuring that if he films everything either in close-up or master and doesn't move the camera too much that it'll feel unostentatiously classical, and that if he lets his actors show off they'll fill out their placeholder characters with chemistry alone.

It really doesn't work until you tune into its wavelength. But if can do that, you may start to see method behind the film's madness and end up feeling as I did—that for all of its flaws, it's the first film since "Eastern Promises" that has added anything truly fresh to the old school street-level gangster story.