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Martin Scorsese's The Departed hits all the high points for an urban crime flick: a twisting, betrayal-filled narrative makes for fantastic gunfights and despicably delicious characters running loose in the big-city sprawl. While it is the slow-to-boil plot that makes (and sometimes breaks) this thriller, it would all be for naught without the actors.

It is thanks to this fantastic acting that the convoluted story is able to break free of relatively uninspired moviemaking and enter the realm of great cinema. Breathing life into already-complex characters, these men and women (what few there are) inhabit a dark, comically morbid world and make it real. As each shot is fired and the body count mounts ever higher, viewers won't be able to help to feel each and every loss. In this, Scorsese shows himself to be a better director than his contemporaries: he has elevated The Departed from blood-soaked obscenity into the realm of artwork.

This film, adapted by William Monahan from the Asian drama Internal Affairs, is, at heart, a tale of two moles. One, fresh-faced Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), is a high-class and charming new inductee into the Boston police department. He is also a long-time devotee of local crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) and quickly begins feeding the mob leader insider info. The other spy is Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), straight from the lower end of Boston's class structure (with a short detour into its mother's world of riches and nobility). Attempting to escape a family fraught with petty criminals, he is nonetheless forced into an undercover assignment by the department's resident hard-ass, Dignan (Mark Wahlberg). From there, the two cadets' false lives intertwine as Costigan falls in with Costello's gang, Sullivan keeps the police off of Costello's tail, and both men fall for a troubled police psychiatrist. Things heat up further as both the PD and gang realize spies are in their midst and begin hunting the two men actively.

Given the detailed, circuitous nature of this plot, one would assume that Monahan would have ensured that it always remained at least relatively clear to the viewer. This, however, is not the case, as heavy Boston accents and abrupt time-shifts smother the finer details of the plot in a mire of confusion. As most of the ends are slowly tied together at the conclusion, a bright viewer is able to piece it all together, but most moviegoers will likely want to sit through the film twice to catch everything

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