Last month’s trailer for Scott Cooper’s (Out of the Furnace) Black Mass highlighted what could potentially be a grand return to form for Johnny Depp, who stars as Whitey Bulger, one of the most notorious gangsters in American history. That trailer was structured around a central dinner scene, in which Bulger menacingly torments a dinner companion over the relative ease in which he reveals a valued secret family recipe. The new trailer similarly uses a dinner scene as its foundation, but is decidedly lighter in tone, and contrasts well with the accompanying images of Depp ruthlessly terrorizing victims throughout South Boston.
The preview shows Bulger giving some not-so-fatherly advice to his six-year-old boy, much to the objection of Dakota Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey). This scene is cut against a series of shots of Bulger mercilessly reigning over South Boston, with Rick Ross’s The Devil is a Lie serving as a fitting soundtrack for the trailer.
Although Depp may be known more nowadays for his eccentric roles in family films like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, The Lone Ranger, or Mortdecai, the actor is no stranger to crime biopics. Black Mass is his first foray into the gangster genre since 2009’s Public Enemies, in which the actor played another famous American gangster, John Dillinger. Before that, Depp starred in the drug trafficking crime film Blow, where he played George Jung, and he also played undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone in Donnie Brasco.
Besides Depp and Johnson, the supporting cast for Black Mass, which will be released on September 18th, includes Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game), Kevin Bacon (X-Men: First Class), Joel Edgerton (Exodus: Gods and Kings), Juno Temple (Maleficent), Adam Scott (Hot Tub Time Machine 2), Peter Sarsgaard (Blue Jasmine), Corey Stoll (Ant-Man), and David Harbour (A Walk Among the Tombstones).
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