Johnny Depp’s childhood advice from mom regarding bullies: ‘Pick up a brick

Although the crime biopic has yet to be released, the 52-year-old actor is already receiving critical acclaim for his role as real-life Boston gangster Whitey Bulger. Towering over the proceedings is Johnny Depp, who brings his A-game to the role of Bulger, including a major physical transformation. The whole time, you’re just waiting for Joe Pesci from Goodfellas to pop up and say, “Whaddaya mean, I’m amusing ?”

Bulger’s brother is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, and Joel Edgerton is the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who recruits and protects him. “It was violence”. But with sneering menace, an air of unpredictability and a chilly demeanor, Depp wholly owns the character and is scary good embodying the psychopathic Bulger.

“If somebody tried to bully my kid, if they didn’t destroy the little booger, I would.”

How can you be glad that someone who killed a lot of people goes on the run? “He’s a sicko, a psycho”. Jesse Plemons, as Bulger’s muscular assistant-whose beaten-flat face fills the screen in the opening shot-is a vision of Irish wrath that can’t be matched elsewhere in the movie.

At one point, it seemed rather inevitable that Johnny Depp would one day win an Academy Award. He cares about Bulger and convinces him to slip the feds valuable information that can help make the town nearly crime-free.

Bulger was finally convicted in 2013 of participating in 11 murders while in charge of a huge criminal network from the 1970s to the 1990s.

That has all been a warm up for his terrifying, mesmerizing and electrifying work in “Black Mass“. The deep kind of embodiment, of that chilling sort of stillness and silence of his you know, the coiled snake aspect of him which I thought was very special and great to be opposite.

“I think he should have spoken to the victims before he took on this movie or got the papers from the trial to see how these victims felt and what [Bulger] was really like”, Donahue told the Globe. The family was poor and he got involved with crime very early.

Depp added, however, that his responsibility as an actor is to do the right thing by that person he is portraying.

It’s a hard-edged tale to be sure, fuelled by Bulger’s violent and grim behaviour, but Depp found it best not to judge the character. There’s a man who cries. From dialogue, we hear that Bulger is more than just hustling the cigarette machine racket and killing off squealers in his seriously porous organization-“Every one of those Winter-Hill punks is a double-crossing obscenity” says an FBI agent.

Meanwhile, Connelly becomes a master at manipulating the clockwork of the FBI’s procedural philosophy by creating fake reports (as we learn later) and giving Bulger credit for the eventual downfall of the Italian mob in Boston, which, of course, only made Whitey more powerful.

It’s the type of exhaustive story that demands Martin Scorsese’s stylistic eye and William Monahan’s economical storytelling, but those two only paid spiritual homage to Bulger when they carved out 2006’s The Departed.