The Departed

After watching my beloved UGA Bulldogs suffer a complete meltdown (and, let's be honest) beatdown at the hands of the Tennessee Volunteers, I was sorely, sorely in need of a good movie today. Luckily for me, Martin Scorsese had just the perfect remedy.

I was worried going in that, having gotten only four hours of sleep, I might have trouble keeping up with this fairly complicated flick, but I had nothing to worry about. The dialogue is fast and often funny, and the story, penned by William Monahan and based on the Hong Kong flick "Infernal Affairs," kept me rapt until the last man standing (who it is, of course, you won't hear from me). In case you can't tell yet, this isn't gonna be a review. I'll apologize in advance. This is gonna be a full-fledged rave.

What Scorsese and Monahan have accomplished here isn't simply an Americanized remake of a foreign flick. As we well know by now, any Hollywood hack can - and does - do that. Instead, it's a transformation, taking the potboiler premise of the equally great "Infernal Affairs" and recasting it completely on their own terms.

From the outset, in Jack Nicholson's opening shadowy introductory speech, what you get is a strong sense of place. And though they're the streets of Boston now rather than New York or New Jersey, they're the "Mean Streets" Mr. Scorsese used to know so well. Just as Woody Allen adapted London and brought it to life in "Match Point," Scorsese has taken to Boston and made it seem like his natural home turf.

I guess I should at least mention the plot, for anyone who may have no idea what I'm talking about. The story here is one of undercover police work and taking on the Boston mafia. Without giving too much away, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio play two Massachusetts state police academy graduates. One is a plant from the mob, however, and the other is recruited to go undercover and infiltrate said mob. You won't even hear from me which is which, but just as in "Infernal Affairs," it's interesting to watch as their identities continue to blur.

What you would have here, if it weren't so well written by Monahan, would be a B-movie at best. And Monahan and Scorsese know that. As the story gets more and more complicated, they never forget that this is supposed to be fun. And it is.

To bring this home, you need men acting manly, so why not get the baddest man (except maybe Samuel L.) of all. As mob boss Frank Costello, Nicholson is cool, more than a little crazy and almost a cartoon. I say almost because he plays it right to the top, but never over.

As for Leo and Matt, they're both very good, but I'll give the edge here to Leo. From his first big scene with cops Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg (yes, there are a ton of A-listers in this one, but none wasted), he just looks like the angry young man he should be. He looks like the kind of dude who could have taken on Daniel Day Lewis' Bill "The Butcher" Cutting, which he never effectively did in "Gangs of New York." And as the sole chica with any kind of role in this tale of men being manly, Vera Farmiga shines as the woman trapped between these two converging forces.

A final note about cell phones that crossed my mind as this one ended. I've never much liked thrillers in which they played a prominent role, until now. Before "The Departed," I had never seen a movie where text messaging played such a key role. Scorsese has his characters wield their phones as weapons, and I was surprised at just how well it worked.

In the audience, however, I didn't hear or see one cell phone through the whole movie. Just a packed house of viewers engrossed enough to keep silent throughout a movie made for adults who love watching movies. The first thing I heard anyone say until the closing credits was when the person with me leaned over and said, in language Mr. Monahan would have surely appreciated, "that was f-ing awesome." I couldn't have put it better myself.