There can be no doubt that the city
of Boston has experienced one of the most traumatic and bizarre periods in
recent history, and as the latest victim of terrorism, Boston has come together
and stood strong in the wake of unspeakable violence and unimaginable
terror. For any of the folks that spent
an entire day under a police mandated lockdown, all because the authorities
simply didn’t know what could happen next, only to emerge from your homes to
cheer your local law enforcement on a job well done; I say you are the ones who
deserve an enthusiastic round of applause from the rest of the country, as well
as a continued place in our collective thoughts and prayers.
And
in recent years, the city of Boston itself, with its rich and storied history,
has been the backdrop to some of the best films of the past decade; in fact, it
has become so popular of a filming location that there has emerged a sub-genre
in crime films beginning with “The Boondock Saints” and continuing all the way
through “The Town” all based in Boston.
However, the title of ‘best of the best’ would have to go to Scorsese’s crime
opus “The Departed.” It is imperative
that you know right from the start that I am a self proclaimed super-fan of this
film, even though I consider it slightly inferior to Scorsese’s masterpiece
“Goodfellas,” which for my money is the gold standard for the man’s entire body
of work.
Cinematic Genius or Homeless
Schizophrenic
In
fact, ‘The Departed” is so good that even though I’ve seen it over ten times, I
still eagerly return to watch this gritty tale of betrayal and torn loyalties
over and over again, completely engrossed in the film. That being said; within the awesome, it has
not escaped my attention that there is an inconsistency here and there and perhaps
a plot hole or two. And despite my best
attempts to curb this particular impulse, because of my need to feel superior
to the rest of the planet, I simply can’t resist pointing these flaws out.
The editors of SpoilerAlert Podcast
would like to remind all readers of the title of said podcast and as such
Brando is about to reveal every freakin’ plot point that this film has to
offer. If for some reason you’ve missed this film over the last six years, you
should head to your local Red Box immediately and catch up to the rest of the
civilized world. We’ll wait. Done?
Fantastic! There’s no need to thank us for shining a little more sunshine of
awesome into your life, but the fact remains that this article will probably
make more sense if… you know… you’ve actually seen the movie and know the plot
of the film. Thank you.
JUST
A FEW QUESTIONS FOR EVERY MEMBER OF BOSTON LAW ENFORCMENT:
Who
the hell isn’t undercover in this universe?
The film begins with Jed Bartlett
and Dirk Diggler recruiting Leonardo DiCaprio to infiltrate Jack Nicholson’s
gang and hopefully bring an end to his reign of crime in the great city of
Boston. So great a scourge is
Nicholson’s Frank Costello on the city that at one point Matt Damon gets
appointed to set up shop in the State Police headquarters with an entire task
force whose sole purpose is to go after him. So DiCaprio is undercover, you
say; sounds great! However, the twist of the film is that Damon is actually a
rat for Costello in the State Police and therefore he’s undercover too! But if
you’re concerned that these two fellas are going to be the only participants in
all this undercover shenanigans, you needn’t worry; because we got plenty more.
Delahunt, the gang member who gets shot right after they’ve played pitch and
toss with Martin Sheen on the roof, is revealed to possibly be undercover
Boston Police (Costello debunks this to the gang, but there is this odd moment
between Delahunt and DiCaprio where he seems to know DiCaprio is an informant
but covers for him).
Falkor!!!
Jimmy
Bags, the guy who’s teeth DiCaprio knocks out when he first starts in with the
bad guys’ crew is revealed to be a BPD informant; and in a huge twist, Costello
himself is working with the FBI the entire time! By my count 60% of all crime in Boston in
this film is perpetrated by undercover officers or informants trying to gain
the confidence of other officers or informants. Were they to all take a
collective week off, the crime rate for the entire city would instantly
decrease by half. Maybe they should focus more time and energy on standard
surveillance or wiretaps?
Wait
a second, where are the surveillance and wiretaps?
In the finale of the film, Damon
decides to sell Costello out and with the help of DiCaprio’s inside information;
he leads the police to a warehouse and catches Costello red-handed at a cocaine
deal. For some reason, this is treated
as a big time coup, even though according to both Damon and DiCaprio, Costello
goes to these things all the time, as its part of his badass image of himself
to take a personal interest in his empire.
My question is this: if he’s always at these wacky drug deals, why not
just get a team or two of subtle surveillance cops to stick to him like glue
and simply catch him the normal way?
In
addition, Damon spends the entire last half of the movie playing both sides of
the equation as he’s essentially leading the State Police manhunt for Costello’s
rat (himself) and desperately trying to convince Costello to lay low until he
can find out who the cop is in his gang.
But at one point, Costello calls Damon on his home phone land line. Um… couldn’t a judge issue a warrant for a
wire tap to be planted on Frank’s phone and all of the sudden we’ve got his rat
with one phone transcript therefore negating the need for months of high
tension intrigue?
Why
the hell don’t the cops send someone outside during the microprocessor deal?
The police’s most promising chance
to get Costello, and Damon’s most nerve-wracking moments avoiding discovery, is
a joint operation with the FBI to observe and record Costello selling stolen
microprocessors to members of the Chinese Triad. Before the deal is done
though, the cops realize they have a blind spot and can’t see everything they
need to see through the surveillance cameras, and as a result, their hopes are
dashed when no one ever comes out of the building and Costello and company give
them the slip and are allowed to escape on boats into Boston harbor. This turn
of events causes more than a little bit of frustration on the part of the cops,
as they had apparently pinned all of their hopes to a poorly conceived bust
that not even Damon, the team leader of the unit charged with taking Costello
down, knows anything about. It ends
badly for the law, but I’m wondering why couldn’t they just have had three cops
run around to the other side of the building to visually ID Costello and the
boys and then have Harbor Patrol stop Frank with one million dollars in his
hand?
How
does a professional police officer just flip the switch to hardcore assassin
after he suspects Damon sold out his partner?
The final scene of the film is that
Damon comes home to find Walburg standing in his place, dressed and ready to
shuffle him off the mortal coil, a move Damon condones as he feels unworthy to even
be alive at this point. But how in the hell did Walburg walk off the job, spend
a few weeks stewing over Damon’s betrayal and then just decide to break bad and
show up at Damon’s condo ready and willing to commit cold blooded murder? Isn’t that a rather severe reaction from a
man that has sworn to defend and uphold the law? To me, that seems a little like resorting to
arson just because Domino’s got your order wrong.
“Ok, I set the building on fire…”
Plus,
how the hell is Walburg going to walk off the job in the first place knowing
that he is totally leaving DiCaprio high and dry by doing so? He and Sheen are the only two people in the
world that know he’s an undercover cop; with Sheen dead, doesn’t Walburg have a
responsibility to go meet with DiCaprio immediately and tell him to get the
hell out of dodge because the situation is no longer controllable?
NOW
HERE’S A QUESTION FOR FRANK:
How
the f#&k do you not know that DiCaprio is the rat?
When Alec Baldwin is setting up the
State Police’s investigation into Costello he mentions that Costello uses three
key guys: Delahunt, Fitzy, and French. This is when Damon is first joining the
investigation into Costello, so it’s established that this is before DiCaprio’s
Billy Costigan ever joins his crew. Once
old Frank lets Billy in however, he almost immediately starts getting that
feeling that there’s something wrong and maybe there’s a cop in sheep’s
clothing lurking within his organization.
Well, let’s take a deep look at this conundrum. First of all Frank, has any member of your
crew ever voluntarily joined a law enforcement organization? Well, Billy did,
but that’s probably not that big of a deal. And remember that one time Damon
told you to get everyone’s social security numbers so you made everyone wait at
the bar until the answers came back, did anyone act funny and refuse to stay
put until you could identify them? Bill again, huh?
Okay…
Even
more, when Damon and company get to the microprocessor deal, he makes a note
that Costello, French, Fitzy, Delahunt, and “the new guy” Costigan go into the
warehouse. Shortly thereafter, Sheen
demonstrates that he is communicating directly with his undercover man who is inside
the building with Costello (something Damon would have told Frank). So, immediately after you let Billy join the
gang, you start having increased police pressure and feel like you have a
rat. And out of the four possible men it
could be, one of them who has been with you for over 30 years according to a
flashback, you can’t figure out if it’s the two unquestionably loyal meatheads
that have been with you for years or the new guy that’s only been around for a
few months who once tried to be a cop and now can’t sit still around you for
more than a minute and who constantly asks too many questions? Yeah, you’re a
freakin’ criminal mastermind.
A
FEW “WHAT THE HELL?!?” QUESTIONS:
Was
Madolyn ever going to get a paternity test for her baby?
She tells Damon the child is his and
seems to be excited about it; however when DiCaprio comes to see her at her
office she indicates that she has something really big to tell him and that she
really needs to get it off her chest. At
Billy’s funeral, Damon asks her about the baby, only to have her completely
ignore him and act as if she never knew him.
If she had his child in her womb, she would at least stop to tell him
he’ll never see the boy or work out child support or something. Instead, the way she cries over Billy’s grave
and walks away from Damon indicates that she’s going to consider the child a
product of her and Billy’s affair.
But
what was her plan of action going to be if everyone had stayed alive and was of
good legal standing to claim fatherhood? I mean, if Billy hadn’t gotten gunned
down by an evil State Trooper and Marky Mark hadn’t repainted Jason Bourne’s
living room with his own brains, was she going to book an appearance on Maury
and have a paternity test showdown or something?
“And the Oscar for Best
Picture goes to…”
What
happened to the poor Asian guy Damon knifed in the alley?
Billy’s best chance to catch
Costello’s mole is at a porn theatre where Nicholson and Damon are meeting to
exchange the envelope containing all the gang’s social security info. Desperate to make a bust and end this entire
nightmare, Billy stalks Damon through the narrow streets of Chinatown, trying
to find out who the mole is. However,
Damon gets wise to the fact that he has a tail and he ducks behind a delivery
truck that is parked just outside of a Chinese food restaurant. After a few
tense moments of waiting, Damon makes his move and thrusts his knife into… some
poor son of a bitch that was just trying to deliver some dim sum!! The guy goes
down and Damon skulks off only to have Billy stealthily follow him into the
street. Bill, I know you’re undercover
and probably don’t have your Miranda rights card in your back pocket, but you
just witnessed aggravated assault and battery with a dangerous weapon!!!
(Punishable by up to 15 years imprisonment and a fine of up to $10,000 under
the Massachusetts Penal Code) This is to say nothing of the fact that as a
police officer (even an undercover one), you’re first priority is to preserve
life at all times. Way to go with giving that awkward glance down at the
stabbing victim who is literally lying in the gutter at your feet, right before
you prance on out of the crime scene in your failed attempt to simply look at
another human’s face!! Seriously, how did you get this job again?
Why
does Damon’s neighbor shun him when he comes home from the store?
Damon is a Massachusetts State Trooper,
and even though we all know he’s a rat bastard, to the fictional public of this
universe, he’d be known as the Hero Trooper that finally brought down Frank
Costello. Yet, when he walks into his
apartment building and tries to be friendly with his neighbor’s dog, she jerks
the dog away and acts like he has the plague. Can she smell the rat-prick on
him? Or does she know that Max Paine is waiting inside his place to assassinate
him and doesn’t want to bother with the mundane chit-chat?
Trooper
Brown knows who Billy is the entire film, why doesn’t he say anything to anyone
until after Billy reveals himself to be an informant?
Did this guy really spend his whole
career never mentioning to anyone that he had a quasi personal relationship
with one of the five guys his special sub-unit is investigating? When Billy is
sitting in Damon’s office after Costello is dead, Damon offhandedly asks Brown
if he knows who Billy is; a question which Brown responds to affirmatively.
You’re telling me that these cops never went for a beer after work and Brown
got a little buzz going and slurred out, “It’s so weird that Billy is in
Costello’s crew, because back when we were in the academy together, we were so
tight that we could share vaguely racist insults with each other. I mean, if ever there was a perfect police
informant to infiltrate Costello’s operation and then report back to the snitch
crew, he’d be the guy. Oh well, pass the
beer nuts.” Seriously?
BUT
WAIT, DEAR READERS!!!
Perhaps
these are not plot holes or flaws at all, but rather just subtle clues to
encourage us to find the true criminal mastermind that has been operating behind
the scenes the entire time:
Arec Barrwin!!!
Baldwin’s
Captain Ellerby is the real criminal mastermind behind the chaos and has been
the entire time!! Let’s just consider the evidence:
1) He
lets two (count em!) of Costello’s informants into the Massachusetts State
Police’s Special Investigations Unit. I
understand these guys aren’t working for Disney or anything crazy like that,
but isn’t there some sort of background check where they look at your known
associates and could easily figure out that Trainee Sullivan used to spend all
his free time hanging out at Costello’s garage during his impressionable years?
2) He
compares his immaculate record with Damon’s, citing the similarities he shares
with someone we all know to be a bad guy, and on the basis of that comparison
puts Damon in charge of rooting out Costello’s informant. A move that basically
gives him carte blanches to investigate anyone he wants to and directly results
in Sheen’s pavement dive.
3) He
allows Walburg to walk off the job with ABSOLUTELY NO investigation into whether
or not Sheen was Costello’s informant or if so was Walburg involved in the
deception with him. The guy throws up
the deuce to an active and vital investigation and Baldwin’s only response is a
slight dig at his inevitable career path and to wish him the best of luck?
4) He
never even bats an eye when Damon basically admits that Jimmy Pappas’ probably
didn’t kill the two mobsters from Providence (Costello did and then framed the
poor bastard, a move he takes the time to lay out for Damon to follow), but
it’s probably just more convenient for all the cops if they don’t look this
gift horse directly in the mouth. Wasn’t
there some sort of oath these cops had to take about fidelity and commitment to
justice and all that?
5) Upon
hearing the news that Damon has established an unauthorized communication link
with Sheen’s unknown informant, Baldwin’s only reaction is to completely go
along with Damon’s plan to take down Costello and to never even reprimand him
for way overstepping the bounds of his authority. “You say you’ve disobeyed a direct order and
have put this entire operation in jeopardy with some more of your patented
tomfoolery? Ok, let’s see how this plays out. All units, blindly follow Will
Hunting’s instructions from here on out.”
Seriously,
add it all up and you’ve got your true master criminal right there.
From
the SpoilerAlert Investigative Division, be safe out there.
-Brando
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