Great crime dramas used to be among the most common genre of movies. It’s not as if the genre has gone away completely, to be sure, but today, it can be more difficult to find a well-told story about cops and robbers. With Black Mass arriving on Netflix on September 12, the crime movie vacuum just got filled ever so slightly.
The movie, which tells the story of Whitey Bulger’s criminal empire and his cooperation with the FBI, is almost a decade old now. If you missed it when it was first released in theaters, though, these are three reasons that you should definitely make time for it while it’s streaming.
It assembles a great cast
Johnny Depp earned plenty of praise for his performance as Whitey Bulger, but he’s far from the only reason Black Mass is worth checking out. The movie is filled with great actors who were either on the rise at the time or were already established greats, including Benedict Cumberbatch as Bulger’s brother, Joel Edgerton as the cop who turns him, Jesse Plemons ( Civil War ), and Dakota Johnson ( Madame Web ).
Black Mass is so compelling in part because every actor in it has a face that you’ll remember, and they command the necessary gravitas to make the story they’re telling feel real.
It’s based on a remarkable true story
Black Mass is not the kind of movie that tells the true story beat for beat, but the movie is nonetheless based on the true story of Whitey Bulger’s criminal enterprise, which he was running even as he was also cooperating with the FBI to take down the Italian mob.
The movie is compelling in large part because many of its details feel true to life, and also because it’s a reminder that, amid all the fictional mob stories out there, there was a very real battle going on between federal authorities and the mafia, and they were willing to recruit some truly terrible people to do their dirty work.
It’s a meditation on the impossibility of justice
Black Mass is interesting in part because it’s a movie where no one comes out with their hands clean. Instead, we realize that the cops are in bed with the bad guys, and we come to understand that though many of the people involved in this story served lengthy jail sentences, nothing can undo the harm they caused.
Director Scott Cooper is careful to highlight that justice does not erase harm, and Bulger’s story, as riveting as it was, had real costs and victims. This is a movie that never forgets that it’s mostly about the bad guys, and that regular people can become nothing more than collateral damage.
Black Mass is streaming on Netflix.
