Set in the lower depths and shiny high-rises of a Boston where the church lacks the moral stature to control bingo, The Departed tells a tale of the bad luck of the Irish with black humor, zest and cumulative kapow that take off the top of your head.
With The Departed, Martin Scorsese and his screenwriter, William Monahan, have turned the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs into a low-down and majestic cops-and-crooks epic. Far better than Mystic River, it brings to the screen the compass-less Beantown of deteriorating parishes and drifting good-bad guys. It conjures a place where, as Boston author George V. Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle) said, "Sometimes you get afraid of things that go bang in the middle of the night."
