Black mass
Here’s Johnny...
Director Scott Cooper St arring Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Dakota Johnson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juno Temple
ETA 27 November Johny Dep is back . And when we sa y back, we mean it. Playing real-life Boston crim James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, Depp has never been so ruthless or raw (or bald or blue-eyed) as he is in Scott Cooper’s uncompromising gangster pic. Nor has he been attached to anything so juicy, with Bulger allowed to rule the local underworld with a brother in politics and a childhood friend in the FBI. As Cooper puts it: “You couldn’t make this up if you tried.”
Still, that didn’t make Black Mass an easy project to green-light. Several directors were attached, including Jim Sheridan and Barry Levinson, before Cooper ( Crazy Heart, Out
Of The Furnace) steered the ship. Even Depp himself briefly dropped out before seeing sense; since the film’s rapturous world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the talk is that the 52-year-old is firmly in the running to secure his first Oscar.
Depp aside, Cooper has gathered together a stunning ensemble, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson, Juno Temple, Kevin Bacon, Adam Scott and, most crucially, Joel Edgerton as the increasingly corrupt FBI agent John Connolly. “It was like, ‘God, he’s assembling The A-Team,” laughs Edgerton. “I feel like George Peppard is going to come at the end and go, ‘I love it when a plan comes together!’” Adapted from the eponymous book by
Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, it’s Depp’s chilling turn that’ll send shivers down your spine, far outstripping his other true-life criminal, John Dillinger, in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. “With a character like James Bulger, I think you just have to approach him as a human being,” he notes. “Nobody wakes up in the morning and shaves or brushes their teeth and looks in the mirror and thinks, ‘I’m going to do something evil today.’” Well, maybe…