The Departed at 20: Why It Still Matters
Twenty years ago, Martin Scorsese finally won his Oscar — and delivered a crime epic that rewired how Hollywood thinks about remakes, morality, and the long con. The Departed hasn't aged a day.
Twenty years ago this October, Martin Scorsese walked onto the Academy Awards stage and the entire room stood up. Not because the speech was great — it was short, almost stunned — but because everyone in that theater knew they'd been watching the greatest living American filmmaker get snubbed for decades. The Departed didn't just win Best Picture. It closed a chapter.
But here's the thing that gets lost in the Oscar narrative: The Departed is a genuinely perfect crime film. And in 2026, it might be more relevant than ever.
The Remake That Shouldn't Have Worked
Let's get this out of the way — The Departed is a remake. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs (2002) is a taut, elegant Hong Kong thriller about a cop undercover in the triads and a triad mole in the police. It's brilliant. And on paper, remaking it with Boston accents and Dropkick Murphys sounds like a terrible idea.
Except Scorsese didn't just remake it. He devoured it and rebuilt it from the inside out. William Monahan's screenplay took the skeleton of Infernal Affairs and grafted onto it everything Scorsese knows about American corruption — the Catholic guilt, the class warfare, the way power rots everyone who touches it. Where the original is a chess match, The Departed is a bar fight that happens to be orchestrated by geniuses.
That distinction matters. Hollywood has spent the last two decades strip-mining Asian cinema for remakes — most of them forgettable. The Departed remains the gold standard because it understood that adaptation means transformation, not translation.
Three Performances Nobody Has Topped
Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello is the most unhinged mob boss performance since Joe Pesci in GoodFellas. There are stories about Nicholson going so far off-script that Scorsese had to figure out how to use it — the gun under the table, the weird rat monologues, that scene with the severed hand. Half of Costello's menace comes from the fact that you genuinely can't tell what Nicholson will do next.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Billy Costigan gave his most raw performance. Forget the bear in The Revenant — this is the role where DiCaprio stripped everything away. The panic attacks, the shaking hands, the way his voice cracks when he's in too deep. Costigan is a man being eaten alive by the lie he's living, and DiCaprio makes you feel every second of it.
And then there's Matt Damon as Colin Sullivan. The genius of Sullivan is that he's not a villain in the traditional sense — he's a guy who's been performing competence his entire life. Damon plays him with this thin smile that never quite reaches his eyes. You've met this guy. He's in every boardroom, every precinct, every government office. Sullivan is the scariest character in the film because he's the most common.
Scorsese's Late-Career Masterclass
By 2006, Scorsese had been making films for over thirty years. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, Casino — the man had nothing left to prove to anyone except the Academy. What makes The Departed remarkable as a late-career film is that it doesn't feel like a victory lap. It feels hungry.
The editing is ferocious. Thelma Schoonmaker cuts between the parallel lives of Costigan and Sullivan with a rhythm that makes your heart rate spike. The use of cell phones as ticking time bombs — something that felt fresh in 2006 — now reads as an eerie prediction of our surveillance-saturated world. Everyone in this movie is watching everyone else, and nobody can trust the information they're getting.
Michael Ballhaus's cinematography (his final collaboration with Scorsese before retirement) gives Boston this sickly amber glow, like the whole city is running a fever. And Howard Shore's score — those Celtic-tinged strings over the opening — sets a tone of inherited doom before a single line of dialogue lands.
Why It Matters in 2026
Here's where I get personal.
The Departed is a movie about institutional rot. About the impossibility of being good inside a system designed to reward the people who fake it best. Costigan does everything right — he sacrifices his safety, his relationships, his mental health — and the system chews him up anyway. Sullivan does everything wrong and keeps getting promoted.
Twenty years later, does that feel less true? If anything, The Departed's cynicism has aged into prophecy. We live in a world where the performance of integrity matters more than integrity itself. Where the moles keep climbing and the honest operators keep burning out. Scorsese wasn't making a movie about Boston in 2006. He was making a movie about power in every era.
The ending — that rat literally crawling across the railing in the final shot — gets called heavy-handed. Sure. But there's something satisfying about a filmmaker who spent his career studying moral ambiguity just saying: no. Sometimes people are exactly what they appear to be. Sometimes the rat is a rat.
The Scorsese Conversation
You can't talk about The Departed without talking about Scorsese's filmography as a whole. It's not his best film — that's still Raging Bull, and I'll die on that hill. It's not his most personal — that's probably Taxi Driver. But it might be his most entertaining. It's the one you put on at 11 PM and suddenly it's 1:30 in the morning and you're watching Mark Wahlberg's Dignam deliver the most satisfying final scene in modern crime cinema.
The Departed proved that Scorsese at 64 could still outpace directors half his age. And twenty years later, as he continues to make films into his eighties, that energy still hasn't faded.
The Verdict
Some movies turn 20 and feel like museum pieces. The Departed turns 20 and feels like it was released last week. The performances are electric, the script is razor-sharp, and the themes — trust, betrayal, the machinery of corruption — haven't lost a single volt.
If you haven't seen it in a while, go back. If you've never seen it, clear your evening. Twenty years ago, they made something special. They're still not making them like this.
Related title: The Departed