Way back when, I thought Johnny Depp could challenge the status quo and become one of the greatest actors of our generation. He'd been the pretty boy in 21 Jump Street. He'd done an admirable job in the oddball Cry Baby. He'd put on the scissor hands. He'd done Gilbert Grape and cross dressed in Ed Wood. And then he turned in a very, very under appreciated performance in Donnie Brasco -- a gangster film that is -- to me -- on par with Casino and Goodfellas.
His performance in Brasco was so good I figured he had a chance to be maybe the best ever because he was so versatile. After he owned the screen in Pirates, I was pretty sure of it. He was good in Blow. Good in Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
But he kept working with Tim Burton, donning weird wigs, making stupid faces and wearing funky hats.
Alice. Sleepy Hollow. Sweeny Todd. Lone Ranger. Dark Shadows. Tusk. Even when he tried to do other things, he couldn't escape acting like a weirdly affected flit. Tourist, Rum Diary, Transcendence, Mortdecai were all box office poison. It's like he became a shitty version of Steve Martin or something.
So when I heard he'd signed on to play Boston mobster Whitey Bulger (the inspiration for Jack Nicholson's role in The Departed) I was encouraged. Maybe he was finally going to get back to actually acting and not just inhabiting some weird outfit while making faces at the screen.
The trailer leaves me a little in limbo. He had to go full makeup. Had to put in the contacts and weird it up a little. But this looks a whole lot more like the Depp career arc I thought I'd see post-Brasco.
The Whitey story already intrigues me. Read several books on the guy. I hope Depp is the Depp I remember and makes this movie as good as it could be.
I think his future is probably fucked, though. I see that he's currently working on Pirates 5, Alice 2, and resurrecting the ridiculous Inspector Clouseau imitation, Guy LaPointe, from Tusk. So this Depp revival, if there is one, will be short-lived.
Sad.
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