Dripping with menace, Depp is back to his riveting best: BRIAN VINER reviews Black Mass

Published: 20:31 EST, 4 September 2015 | Updated: 20:37 EST, 4 September 2015

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Black Mass (15)

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Hot on the stacked heels of one period gangster film about a real-life pair of brothers, comes another. But Black Mass, which received its world premiere in Venice last night and stars Johnny Depp and Benedict Cumberbatch, is a superior picture to Legend, the story of the Krays, which was also unveiled this week.

Not least because unlike Legend, Scott Cooper’s film does not glamorise its subject matter.

Depp plays Jimmy ‘Whitey’ Bulger, who in the Seventies and Eighties was a notorious gangland boss in Boston, Massachusetts, and enthusiastically supplied arms to the IRA, yet whose brother was respected senator Billy Bulger. This is Cumberbatch, under-used but quite impeccable as the smooth politician who refuses to disown his reprobate sibling.

Star: Johnny Depp in heavy make-up as Jimmy 'Whitey' Bulger in new film Black Mass

But it is Depp’s show, and once you stop being distracted by the efforts of the make-up department – which give him a high forehead, drastically slicked-back hair and the faint air of a visitor from outer space – his portrayal is utterly riveting.

Just like Tom Hardy’s Reggie Kray, Depp’s Bulger is potently charismatic, good to his mum, and popular in the old neighbourhood.

But not for a second are we meant to warm to him, even when his young son dies tragically. Menace swirls around him like the whiff of cheap aftershave.

Allies and enemies alike turn their backs on him at their peril.

And for all the sometimes exceedingly graphic violence, no scene is more disturbing or sinister than one in which the threat is only implied, as Bulger pretends to be solicitous towards the wife of his FBI associate John Connolly (Joel Edgerton).

She is worried about the liaison and is right to be. Connolly grew up in Boston’s Irish-American South End with the Bulger brothers and is still in Jimmy’s thrall.

At first their alliance is a marriage of convenience. Connolly, an FBI high-flyer, wants to bring down the Mafia family who control the city’s North End, and that suits Bulger too.

Premiere: Depp with his wife Amber Heard at the film's opening night in Venice on Friday

But over the ensuing years, as Connolly tries to keep his fellow Feds off his old friend’s back, he becomes increasingly corrupt.

Incidentally, the FBI chief is played, splendidly, by Kevin Bacon, and what a pleasure it is to see him on our cinema screens not advertising a mobile telephone network. He should do more of it.

A terrific supporting cast also includes Dakota Johnson but not Sienna Miller, whose scenes as Bulger’s girlfriend ended up on the cutting-room floor.

But there are other British connections. Coincidentally, just as the Krays film was scripted by an American, so is Black Mass co-written by a Brit, Jez Butterworth.

It is a fine screenplay, too, manifestly in debt to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and The Departed, but none the weaker for it.

For a UK audience, there is also some satisfaction in learning that Bulger’s eventual downfall was caused by an IRA arms shipment that went wrong. Not that the mobster was brought to book, he simply went on the run and to the top of the FBI’s most-wanted list.

His extraordinary, troubling story is surely destined to do good box-office business, which will mark a welcome return to form for Depp after a steady series of flops – including a career low, the misconceived action comedy Mortdecai. Cumberbatch, meanwhile, can do no wrong.

Black Mass opens in the US later this month and in the UK in November.