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“Black Mass” could get Johnny Depp back in the Oscar game

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At one point, it seemed rather inevitable that Johnny Depp would one day win an Academy Award. He was a golden boy of sorts, but then Depp fell off the wagon a bit. The allure of playing Captain Jack Sparrow repeatedly and fooling around with Tim Burton in his various flights of fancy more or less, with the exception of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, removed him from the Oscar map. It’s been that way for a while now, but this week, Depp is back in a big way with Black Mass, his first legitimate awards vehicle in years. With that, he’s once again a contender in the Best Actor field. The film is a look at notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger and the alliance he had with the FBI, specifically with John Connolly. Depp plays Bulger and Joel Edgerton plays Connolly and we watch how they go from childhood acquaintances to partners in crime, almost literally. You see Bulger rise to power with his Winter Hill Gang and abuse his status as a protected informant, all while Connolly attempts to keep the feds from going after him. Scott Cooper directs this mob movie, the script is by Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk, while the cast is vast. In addition to Depp and Edgerton, we have the likes of Kevin Bacon, W. Earl Brown, Bill Camp, Rory Cochrane, Benedict Cumberbatch, David Harbour, Dakota Johnson, Julianne Nicholson, Jesse Plemons, Peter Sarsgaard, Adam Scott, Corey Stoll, and Juno Temple. It’s a crowded ensemble, to say the least. Obviously, the star here is Depp and he gets to do something less cartoonish for the first time in a while. Sure, I like him occasionally in those sorts of roles (notably in Kevin Smith’s Tusk), but he’s more suited to this sort of a ting. While I’ll confess to not being blown away by him in the same fashion as a number of my colleagues, I can easily appreciate why this performance is contention worthy. The same goes for Edgerton, as both play complex characters with questionable morals. In some ways, you can see how Bulger and Connolly became the characters that Jack Nicholson and Matt Damon respectively played in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, though this is far less flashy than that. It likely won’t be close to the Oscar play that one was either, but we shall see… Speaking of awards, what’s [...]

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