Sorry, CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow.
Along with the announcement that it will be playing at the Toronto International Film Festival this September (more on that here), Warner Bros recently dropped a full-length trailer for Black Mass, a crime film about notorious Irish-American mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, played by Johnny Depp. The movie also features performances by Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Corey Stoller, and Meth Damon (Jesse Plemons). I never thought I’d say this about a movie starring Depp (Mortdecai being the final nail the coffin), but this film looks fantastic. Not only that, but Depp’s performance looks to be absolutely transformative, at least from what’s been released so far; he’s damn near unrecognizable, both in appearance and in demeanor. You can watch the trailer for yourself below:
This is what I love to see in a trailer; I know the basic premise of the film, mobster has ties to a corrupt agent in the FBI and is allowed to run amok as a result, leaving a few clean agents to try and take him down, but there’s still so much more left. It raises more questions than it answers, and that’s the perfect way to excite viewers and make them watch your movie, rather than sum up the entire film in three short minutes, leaving nothing to the imagination (I’m looking at you Nightcrawler). I also wanted to note that although the background song feels like it wouldn’t really blend with the theme if you listened to it before you watched the trailer, the editors behind this actually do make it fit quite well, so more brownie points for that.
On top of that, the trailer is able to give this sort of “larger than life” feeling to Depp’s character beautifully, as if he’s more of an urban legend or a force of nature than an actual person; Depp is in nearly every shot (because duh, it’s a biopic about his character), yet he only has three lines in the entire two and a half minute trailer, and all of them are pretty short and concise. Instead, the trailer is composed of everyone else talking about Bulger and how ruthless he is, which does a hell of a lot better job of conveying his persona to the viewer than just having Bulger talk about how badass he is for the entire trailer.
If you told me a year ago that I’d actually be excited for Johnny Depp’s latest performance, I’d have asked you when was the exact moment that hell froze over, but here I am, still sitting in hell at a comfortable 60 degrees Fahrenheit; but enough about my living situation, what do you guys think about this new trailer?