Black Mass

Johnny Depp stars in Black Mass as the real-life 1970s crime kingpin James “Whitey” Bulger, a mass murderer allowed to run wild in the streets of South Boston for years due to his favored status as an FBI informant. The script strains to paint Bulger as a scary but vaguely sympathetic grieving father, an emotionally wounded Nosferatu in a Member's Only cowl (true to form, Depp allows his prosthetic teeth to do most of the acting), but that just leaves him at the center of a film without a center. A hilarious chowder rainbow of bad Boston accents aside, Black Mass is such a sturdily faceless production that it could have come from a kit labeled “Whitey Bulger Biopic”—director Scott Cooper just happened to assemble the pieces. If you're interested in the Bulger story, Joe Berlinger directed a perfectly serviceable documentary last year; start there and skip this rote biopic.