The Departed

I was complaining to a friend about the final half-hour of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, and he suggested I was looking at it all wrong. If you see the movie as a serious cop-and-gangster thriller, it does fall apart, with its escalating body count and that blunt-instrument final shot, juxtaposing unattainable dreams with vermin. But if you see it as a comedy … .