Too many elements are misjudged. Impossibility is not a fault in romance since romance is the genre of fantastic wish-fulfillment (e.g., Superman to the rescue). But inconsistency, when, for example, the moviemakers don't stick to the terms they themselves have established, is a problem. Thus, we may fairly object when Costello arranges a secret meeting in a porno theater and then gratuitously makes a spectacle of himself with a dildo. The movie is trying to key itself to Costello's ungoverned male self-assertion, to show it, in fact, as a general condition, on both sides of the law, but ends up pushing the hyper-masculine brinksmanship too hard. Wahlberg's role has to be overdone to be done at all (he was more compelling in the low-key party scene in I ♥ Huckabees), which you could also say of Costello and the roles played by Alec Baldwin and Ray Winstone. The contrasting suggestion that Damon's Collie is a latent homosexual serves no respectable purpose at all.

Nicholson has been as overhyped playing Costello as he was playing the Joker in Batman (1989). He's better than that here, but his role hasn't been meaningfully developed from the one-dimensional greasy fatcat in the original. (Some of what's been added makes no sense: why, for instance, does this Irish mobster attend a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor?) In other words, he's been asked for a star performance in a role conceived as a star turn. Rounding out his fourth decade of fame and critical adulation, he has not become a lazy actor. In About Schmidt (2002), he quietly updated for his current age his earliest star persona — the man in a rage against bullshit. He was supported by Alexander Payne's script, however, which completely reconceived Louis Begley's source novel. He's not lazy as Costello, either, nor does Scorsese direct him lazily, as Nancy Meyers did in Something's Gotta Give (2003) (apart from the scene in which he watches Diane Keaton's stage version of their unhappy affair), but his part has been written lazily and it comes to nearly the same thing.

And yet The Departed is compelling, more so than Gangs of New York (2002) and The Aviator (2004), Scorsese's two previous big-prize contenders, put together. (Gangs of New York was so set-bound and stiffly choreographed it's hard not to think of it as Gangs of New York, New York.) What Scorsese gets exactly right is the casting of Damon and DiCaprio as the inversely criminal cops. Damon makes you believe he's the brilliant guy who could pull off the deep-dyed imposture, but he also shows the kind of brittleness that would come from doing it.