From All Movie Guide: The Departed has all the earmarks of a standard undercover cop film. William Monahan's flawless script manages to juggle half a dozen major characters and another half-dozen important minor ones. We get the backstory for each of these characters, and we understand what draws them together so that their interactions feel motivated by behavior and psychology rather than just plot mechanics. With remarkable clarity, Monahan depicts the chain of command for competing police units as well as for the crime ring they are investigating. Based on the finished film, it would be hard to imagine that any decent filmmaker wound not be able to make a good film out of this solid material. The gifted Martin Scorsese turns it into arguably the greatest undercover cop film ever made. Most of the great Scorsese movies are, at their core, genre films. GoodFellas and Mean Streets are both gangster films, the former structured almost exactly like the classic Warner Bros. crime films of the '30s like Scarfac...

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