"The Departed"

Saw this last night. The critics are hailing it, and their is talk of the first Oscar worthy movie of the year. Over at rottentomatoes.com people are praising it just as much as the critics. I can only really think of one thing to say, IS EVERYONE DRUNK?

My first reaction to this film are the unsurmountable number of continuity errors. In a pivotal scen where DiCaprio's character is meeting with a police contact, the contact hands him a glass of water. As the scene cuts to a different camera angle (now I can understand things like water levels in glasses changing I can look past that) the glass that is in his hand disappears! Not just different location, different hand, different water level, but is gone entirely from the shot. I kept finding myself distracted by these avoidable mistakes. The line producer must have been completely shitfaced, or asleep during production.

With the editing, stylistically they made some interesting choices. Some worked some didn't. If they had decided to go with a stylistic feel and kept it consistent it definitely would have helped with continuity. At times it felt like the film was winding up into a Snatch type action thriller with a stylized editing feel. But would then drop back into a more classical editing cut with cut to cut on characters and not many cut aways. I'm left with the feeling that Scorcese and the Producers couldn't fully commit to trying something new and daring, but instead wanted to straddle the line keeping one feet in each area for safety. And in turn the film feels like your straddling between Reservoir Dogs and Snatch, without fully touching on the strengths of either.

For entertainment it works. But don't except Terentino level quality, or Stone consistency.