Review of “Black Mass” — That Prostitute’s Choking Sound Though

Black Mass stars Johnny Depp. The silly boy’s forgotten his pirate hat this time, but no matter, the Black Pearl is still as functional as ever.

I like the way Joel Edgerton looks like a smarmy bitch the whole movie since he does that really well. Benedict Cumberbatch, who is as we all know a native Bostonian, really excels in keeping his accent on-point. Sometimes, he’s got SUCH a good accent that you’d think he’s overcompensating for an entirely different accent that might alter his pitch! Imagine if he was English, how hard it would be to pull off the utterly mesmerizing accent he puts on show here.

Corey Stoll, the best piece of the whole puzzle, has a GREAT cameo for the last twenty minutes of the film and it was really smart of the director and writers to make sure we never got to see him getting the job done. This way, the writers and director force us, the audience, to use our imagination with allusions to Stoll’s character’s progress. Real clever, fellas. Have us write the movie we came to see for ourselves. Ingenious!

Pacing is stellar. They really did a good job capturing the slow slog of a mobster’s life. Cry over a dead son for five minutes? You bet. Sit around looking menacing for another twenty minutes? Sure thing. Take ten minutes to choke a guy out because he was drunk and told you to fuck off that one time? Why, of course. And speaking of choking, let’s go on to talk about the best supporting actress in the movie. Some WONDERFUL female actress, for sure an A-lister that I simply can’t remember the name of, got a top-bill role as a prostitute Depp has to kill. Well, her choking sound effect is too spot-on. I will be haunted for nights by the sheer accuracy of that gagging and spittle-inducing noise. It sounded like what I imagine would be the result of shoving an entire carrot down a rabbit’s throat; that result being both parties end up dead. We will definitely be seeing more of her in the future based off her obvious mastery of the human trachea functions.

The one thing I will say is a bit of a letdown is the lack of proper masses or poorly lit shots. As the title would like you to believe, I thought Black Mass was going to focus heavily on dark shots of church services for a total of two hours. Instead, there were a variety of lighting choices throughout the film, most of them relatively bright. And, to my great dismay, only a single church service scene was on display here. In short, don’t go in to this movie expecting the expected, because if you expected what I expected, well, you expected wrong.

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