Scorcese mightily succeeds at keeping his audience at the edge of the seat. The suspense in this film is as taut as piano wire around the neck of a snitch. There are good guys acting like bad guys and bad guys acting like good guys and then there are the dead guys -- a.k.a. the departed. Make no mistake, it is also violent.

It's standard tough guy fair, but with strong dialogue, intrigue and great music. Plus, the acting is top notch; it's right up there with the crisp direction and editing. Unfortunately, a contrived love triangle greatly compromises the film's integrity. The coincidences in this weak romance game might easily have been played on us in much lesser scripts. I cringed.

I also cringed at the climax. Audiences deserve much more for staying with this film for two and a half hours. Interestingly enough, DiCaprio's role is quite similar to that in Gangs of New York. He cons the big bad guy into befriending him in a fatherly way. Then lays low and waits for the right time to pounce. Both films, both Scorcese, both DiCaprio.

Without its faults, such a robust rocking picture would easily make it into the A range, but those faults knock it down between a B and B+. As I'm left feeling a bit empty, I'm going to give it a B.

Baldwin and Wahlberg are both hilarious as cops with "in your face" language. Wahlberg has this to say of his hometown. "There is only one Boston. It has a reputation as this amazing school town, but there are also those neighborhoods where you are either going to become a crook or a cop or a construction worker. There's not too much in-between. My being raised there has an effect on everything I do, whether it's obvious or not. I didn't have to do much homework for this movie -- I've known a lot of these guys -- the only difference is I was playing one of the cops who used to arrest me all the time."

"The Departed" is based on the thriller "Infernal Affairs," a 2002 flick out of Hong Kong.

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