Whatever floats your boat I guess. I just felt there was no needless action sequences, no unneccessary violence and the characters were written with alot more subtelty. You cast Jack Nicholson and you aren't going to get that. I also think Ray Winstone is a pretty weak actor and this was no exception.
I think the violence is pretty important: none of the paranoia or terror really works otherwise. I guess, just in talking about this, this particular point has helped me clarify why I didn't respond more to
Infernal Affairs: it felt more like a game. It felt like the only risk of being found out was that you would "lose" the story, rather than that you would be brutally murdered.
There was exposition, but I wouldn't really mark against that in either film really as it's a type of film that is always going to require a bit of it.
Aye, but to my mind that makes it all the more important to find little ways to scale back. Just a preference thing, I guess, since there's obviously a tradeoff there, and one that exists in all films to some degree.
I think the surface-level "biography in a nutshell" thing, with less backstory, dovetails really well with the story being told, though, since the characters all have those kinds of cover stories and have to interact with people on that level the whole time.
And the female characters were given more room to breathe. Which I don't think you can really say about the departed.
I'd agree with this. I think Marty was smarty enough to just have them (well, all but one) be less prominent from the get-go, which is preferable to having lots of paper-thin female characters, but I'd say this is a fair critique. Only counter I can think of is that maybe the ridiculous scheming and brutality and one-upsmanship of the whole world is
because it's so male-dominated.
The ending of both is a stark contrast too. In Infernal Affairs, if memory serves me correctly we get a closure to the emotional connection of the main relationship in the story, which is quite moving and serves as a reminder about the tragedy of the piece. In The Departed, you get no such thing - instead we're faced with a full on, smack in the chops shot of a you know what crawling across the screen. I think this sums up the heavy handedness of The Departed compared to the more nuanced film making of Infernal Affairs.
I will definitely not even
attempt to defend that little...well, I'll have to invent a term that's the opposite of a "grace note."
It's clunky and silly and stupid (FFS, just off the top of my head, how about a little blood splatter on the window in the same shot as the dome?), but mercifully it's just a few seconds at the end of the film.
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