This was supposed to be Johnny Depp’s big comeback moment, the return of the prodigal son of cinema. After a decade-plus flop in his career—soiled by middle-of-the-road Tim Burton films and an unnecessarily excessive Pirates of the Caribbean franchise—Black Mass set itself up to be a possible Oscar-winning landmark in Depp’s rollercoaster of a filmography. Except Depp can only be as good as his film allows him to be, and Black Mass proves to be not much of a starting point for him. Black Mass, while wearing the mask of a well-made gangster film (under the stylistic direction of Scott Cooper), fails to break the surface in the same way the gangster greats of the
