Genre Drama

Black Mass (2015)

Item: Black Mass
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Black Mass (2015)

There's a moment in Black Mass where Johnny Depp, barely recognisable behind pale eyes and thinning, slicked-back hair, leans across a dinner table and does something quietly terrifying. It's the kind of scene that reminds you exactly what this film could have been. And then it goes back to plodding along, and you're left wondering why a story this extraordinary feels so ordinary on screen.

Depp is genuinely committed here, and I'll give him full credit for it. His Whitey Bulger is eerily calm, whispery, and unpredictable in a way that makes your skin prickle when he's on screen. It's one of his better performances in years, and a far cry from the kind of work he was putting in by the time I sat through Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017). Here, at least, you believe he means it. The supporting cast backs him up well, nobody phoning it in, everyone pulling their weight under Scott Cooper's restrained, controlled direction.

The setting works too. The grimy, grey-skied Boston of the 70s and 80s feels authentic rather than costumed, and the violence, when it comes, lands with real weight. It's sudden and brutal in the way that good crime films handle it: no fanfare, no slow motion, just consequence. In those moments, Black Mass has genuine power.

But here's the thing. For a genre I love, this film is oddly, frustratingly flat. The story moves through Bulger's rise and fall like someone ticking boxes on a checklist: cut a deal with the FBI, remove the competition, betray everyone close to you, disappear. There's nothing wrong with that structure on paper, it's just that the film never interrogates any of it. You're watching evil unfold event by event, but you're never really inside it. The psychology stays at arm's length. The moral rot that makes a story like this genuinely compelling never quite gets under the skin.

And the pacing. God, the pacing. At just over 100 minutes, Black Mass somehow manages to feel like it's pushing three hours. The tone barely shifts across the whole runtime. There's no propulsion, no escalating dread, no sense that the film is building toward anything other than the inevitable conclusion you already know is coming. It's not boring exactly, but it never catches fire either. You're engaged enough not to switch it off, but not gripped enough to lean forward.

What's missing, I think, is the same quality that makes the great gangster films work: the feeling that you're seeing something true about power, or loyalty, or the particular way that men convince themselves their violence is justified. Black Mass presents Bulger as monstrous without ever really asking why, or how, or what that monstrousness meant to the people around him. He remains a surface, however well Depp renders that surface.

It's well-made, well-acted, and entirely competent as a crime drama. Two and a half stars feels right: not bad, not a waste of your evening, but a real missed opportunity. Whitey Bulger's story deserved something that actually got inside the darkness. What we got is a procedural in good clothes.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2025-11-05

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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