If you’re keen on true-crime stories or stoked about the forthcoming Johnny Depp vehicle Black Mass and want to do some advance homework, then this documentary about the real-life subject of the latter film should do the trick. Joe Berlinger’s tacky made-for-TV account explains that Boston gangster Whitey Bulger was, as one interviewee describes him, a “vicious, venal murderer … enabled by the FBI”. A compelling stack of evidence and testimony lays out the case that he informed to the FBI, or perhaps simply paid them off, so they would take out the mafia and leave him to rule Boston with merciless violence. Bulger himself is heard at the other end of a phone insisting he wasn’t an informant but, as Mandy Rice-Davies once said: “He would [say that], wouldn’t he?” Dense thickets of information, told via rostrum-shot photos and documents plus angry mob’s worth of witnesses, become a grind after a while, as does the trite guitar-led mystery music.
