Johnny Depp paints it black

There’s a father-son moment in Black Mass between notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger — played by Johnny Depp — and his six-year-old who’s in trouble after hitting a boy in school.

“Never hit somebody in front of other people,” Bulger tells his son. “If nobody saw it, it didn’t happen.”

Not exactly Father Knows Best, but it explains a lot about Bulger’s character. Rising from the South Boston housing projects, he quickly learned to take anything he could grab. Crime became the means to power, and Bulger soon ran an operation that included drugs, gambling, prostitution and every other shakedown known to man. And he didn’t like living, breathing witnesses.

Did it help that his brother, Billy Bulger, a smiling Irish pol played by Benedict Cumberbatch, went on to become State Senate leader of Boston? Some say it did.

What surely aided Bulger in his rise as crime boss — effectively eliminating the Italian and Hispanic competition from Boston’s very racially divided streets — was a deal with the FBI starting in 1975. Bulger agreed to give information to his FBI contact John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) in exchange for virtually free rein over Boston. That’s the story traced in Black Mass, and if the story sounds a little familiar, well, you probably remember it from The Departed (or “The De-PAH-ted,” if we’re going to use our native accent). In that Martin Scorsese film, Jack Nicholson played a Bulger-based character who rules Boston’s crime syndicate with an iron fist and Mephistophelean zeal. Jack’s Whitey was all evil smirk and raised eyebrows, a bit loony like the Joker.

Depp goes for something else here, a portrait of evil that’s so cold-blooded and ruthless, you have a hard time rooting for him. But it is Depp’s best performance in years, something to replace all the Jack Sparrow mannerisms that have come to dominate his acting palette so much recently. In fact, Depp has been in danger of disappearing into chameleon-like impersonations for quite some time. This role as Bulger gives him a chance to redeem himself as an actor, even as it fails to redeem Bulger in any way.

Playing the Irish crime boss with thinning gray hair, piercing blue contacts and an alarmingly discolored front tooth, Depp nails the lizard-like coldness of a man who knows he can push as far as he wants, because nobody will tell him otherwise. An associate mouths off in a bar after a job, and Whitey and his men cap him near the Boston shoreline. The teenage daughter of one of his men’s girlfriends is picked up for drugs and prostitution, and after grilling her about what she might have discussed with the police, Whitey strangles her with his bare hands.

Jesse Plemons (Fargo, Friday Night Lights) plays another dead-eyed killer working for Whitey, not unlike the one he played on Breaking Bad, Todd. And Corey Stoll plays a stolid federal prosecutor who chinks away at Connolly’s protection of Bulger.

Peter Sarsgaard turns up as a Miami hitman who, after hearing an incriminating discussion involving Bulger, is handed a gym bag with $20,000 and is told to keep quiet about it. Unwisely, he instead gets coked up and blabs everything to the police. And you know what happens next.

Whitey even goes as far as to rattle his FBI point man John Morris (David Harbour) after the Fed blithely reveals his wife’s steak marinating secret over dinner. “You reveal your wife’s recipe — a family secret, you said — just like that?” “I… I was just saying…” sputters the G-Man. “’Just saying’?” drawls Bulger. “Just saying can get you buried real quick.”

That already classic moment — shades of Joe Pesci’s psycho in GoodFellas — has been replayed on YouTube half a million times by now. And it’s probably a highlight of the film. But being compared to a Scorsese film is not always an easy ride. Scott Cooper directs efficiently and the script has unexpected nuance and insight. But Black Mass at times lacks propulsion. It lacks the hyperkinetic zip of a Scorsese film, to put it bluntly. It simply plods from murder to murder to murder, revealing bits and pieces of Whitey’s relationship to his old neighborhood pals, his wife (Dakota Johnson, who unfortunately disappears from the story early on) and his brother, who rises up the rungs of Boston politics with the same skill that Whitey rises up the crime ladder.

The problem is, we’ve seen such a film done over and over again — The Godfather, Scarface, GoodFellas — so it’s hard for Black Mass, solid as it is, to add anything new to the genre. One of Scorsese’s gifts was to populate his movies with minor characters who were comic chatterboxes. That way, when the explosions of violence came, they were all the more shocking. While it is perhaps unfair to expect a movie titled Black Mass to go for levity, it is at times, a very somber affair.

There is another problem with such a film, based on a true story. Depp’s Bulger offers very little to attach our emotions to; he is, at heart, an unpleasant psychopath with a habit of eliminating anyone who stands in his way. But then again, so was Hannibal Lecter. But come on: that guy oozed charm. Depp oozes, all right. But it’s rather like the ooze a slug’s trail leaves behind.

Even as Cooper’s script tries to interject Bulger’s deep emotional turmoil after the death of his beloved Irish mom, you don’t see much evidence of it in Whitey’s character. His face certainly never registers an interior change. He just keeps on plugging. And plugging. And plugging.

As strong as Depp’s mimicry is in this film (and it’s certainly worthy of an Oscar nod), you wonder if the actor is capable of showing true vulnerability. Where is Whitey’s inner life? Okay, a psychopath is pretty much “what you see is what you get.” And we don’t really need to see one of Boston’s most notorious hoods — a man who inexplicably drew a winning lottery ticket worth a share of $14 million even as he was being hunted by police (the newspaper headlines quoted him: “What can I say? I’m lucky”) — given the Oprah treatment. But let’s face it: Whitey Bulger was a colorful character. He must have had some charm to match his wits, otherwise he wouldn’t have survived as long as he did before being captured. Perhaps Black Mass should have shown us a few other colors in the paintbox besides basic black.