Like Woody Allen moving his operation from Manhattan to London, Scorsese's trip a couple of hundred miles northeast seems to have a restorative effect. The Departed, with its mega-testosteroned cast - Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone (and yes, there's a girl - Vera Farmiga) - wheels and spins, swoops and roars. It's a movie with a pulse. Sometimes, it flies off the chart.
Damon, a native Beantowner, plays Colin Sullivan, a Catholic altar boy who is befriended at an early age by the local crime lord, Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). A father figure and a killer, Frank watches proudly as young Colin goes to school, grows up, and becomes a star detective in the Massachusetts State Police. An ace cop, Sullivan's loyalty nonetheless lies with Frank - and "lies" is the operative word. As a highly positioned mole in the department, Damon's character is living a double life, reporting every move the cops make back to their No. 1 target: Costello.
On the flip side, there's Billy Costigan (DiCaprio), who goes through the Police Academy and then goes undercover - way deep - in Costello's crime clan. Costigan, fierce, wiry and occasionally wearing a wire, works for the straight-arrow Boston cop Oliver Queenan (Sheen). Only one other guy inside the force - the gruff, unlovable Dignam (Boston native Wahlberg, accented-up), a guy with a ferocious bark and a truly scary hairpiece - knows whose side Costigan is on. To everybody else, he's an academy dropout, a tattooed thug who made his way into Costello's ranks via brutal barfights and in-your-face drug deals.
