Whitey: The United States of America vs James J. Bulger (2014)
Rated R
Directed by Joe Berlinger
The Story:
Go behind the headlines as the United States tries to take down James "Whitey" Bulger once and for all.
The meandering mess that was Black Mass sort of steamrolls over this documentary which is better fleshed out and more compelling than the fictional accounts.
Berlinger approaches the story from the angles of the victims, friends and families of the victims, and the officials who tried to prove once and for all whether Bulger was a mobster or an informant or both.
Seeing this shortly after the Depp version, a lot of the wind was taken out of the sales on this one.
It's still a good documentary, don't get me wrong.
It simply won't rank on my best of the year finale, and I can't pinpoint if it was due to watching the two so close together, so I hate faulting a film for coming second on my depth chart even though it was released years earlier and I simply missed it.
That said, like Making A Murderer, it's amazing to see how much law enforcement, in this case the FBI will indeed cover up their own tracks to hide something.
In this case, they take a look at Top Informant files of other notorious gangsters and compare those thousands of pages files, often with multiple volumes, to the meager few hundred pages on Bulger.
Things definitely don't add up.
To Whitey's defense, he adamantly insists that while he may be many things, and could be guilty of just about everything...
He's not a rat.
It's all about semantics with that man, and in a bizarre way, you can almost respect him for that.
So if you want a nice crime documentary in the near future, give this one a whirl.
Currently streaming on Netflix as of this writing.
Final Grade: B-
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