KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * *
Jack Nicholson's unmistakable gravelly tones get the first line, a voiceover, in Scorsese's new crime picture. "I don't want to be a product of my environment," he growls. "I want my environment to be a product of me."
It's a fitting opening for a project in which Nicholson turns in the most outrageously overblown performance of a career full of them. He doesn't so much steal the show as hijack and crash it. It becomes fascinating to see how much Scorsese will let him get away with - and the answer is "everything".
Like the director's cynical, hollow and vicious Goodfellas, this film is full of artifice but is devoid of artistry or restraint. That it is engrossing, even compellingly watchable, is down to a storyline that is a tasty twist on the double-cross thriller. Even as Boston hoodlum Frank Costello (Nicholson) has groomed an insider in the police force, the cops have a man inside Frank's gang.
Each knows of the other's existence, but not his identity and the film is essentially a cellphone duel as each mole tries to keep his boss ahead of the play.
The story has played before, in the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, which starred Andy Lau and Tony Leung as the competing infiltrators. But where that film was dense, intelligent and darkly funny, this is big and sprawling and messy and showy. On the rare occasions that it builds a head of steam, Nicholson leaps into the centre of the screen and the life goes out of it.
When he appears in the bar that is his HQ, in an ankle-length apron bloodstained because he's been doing a spot of dismembering in the backroom; when - in one of the film's most pointless gestures - he straps on a giant dildo and flashes those eyebrows that, lit from below, look like devil's horns; we are meant to be charmed and awestruck. I felt faintly tired.
It's hard to remember when such a big-name cast was so wasted. Damon and DiCaprio, respectively edgy and careworn, deliver one-note performances. Winstone massacres an American accent (why couldn't he have played an Englishman?), Farmiga, who has shown great chops in indie films and makes her big-budget debut here, is also wasted as a police psychologist who ends up with both men as clients - and more.
If she struggles to breathe life into her part, it's probably because there wasn't much oxygen left on set after Jack inhaled.
The sole real success is Wahlberg as a remorselessly profane and utterly plausible head of the undercover operation. Character and actor don't give a damn whether we like them - and as a result both are irresistible.
Inevitably the story is headed for an unhappy ending but the banal, heavyhanded final shot is the worst of many ill-judged touches. This is not a film Scorsese will be or should be remembered for - though fans of Goodfellas may relish the profligate bloodshed.
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga
Director: Martin Scorsese
Running time: 151 mins
Rating: R16, graphic violence and offensive language
Screening: Everywhere from next Thursday
Verdict: Messy and showy remake of Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs features an unforgivably overblown performance from Nicholson.
