About the Author

Kevin Weeks is a former mobster and was a longtime friend and confidant to James J. Bulger, the infamous boss of the Winter Hill Gang, a crime family based out of the Winter Hill neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts. Phyllis Karas is the coauthor of two previous books. She is a contributor to People magazine and an adjunct professor at the Boston University School of Journalism. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her husband.

Reviews

"Warner Bros. revealed the first footage of Whitey Bulger biopic Black Mass at CinemaCon on Tuesday, giving us our first look at Johnny Depp in the role he's been angling to play for years. With ice blue contacts and that weird haircut, Depp almost does look like a different person in the movie. The footage shows him playing Bulger at a dinner party, leaning on his host to reveal his "family secret" steak marinade recipe. Predictably, this gets dark pretty fast. After Bulger gets the recipe he turns it around, and says something to the effect of, "If you gave up that family secret to me so easily, how can you be trusted?" Then he breaks the tension by laughing, and we cut to him doing your typical gangster movie type of hitman stuff. With that combination of tension, laughter, and violence, Depp feels like he's channeling the Joker when he puts on that Whitey makeup. It's hard to say if this will be a good movie based on the footage we saw, but it does look divisive. If this goes well, Depp will have a heap of critics praising this as a return to form, but it's also easy to see this as something that glorifies Boston's most notorious living crime boss more than anything else. The makeup really is incredible. Depp seems to be obsessed with literally losing himself in his roles lately. In Tusk he plays a backwoods Canadian detective in a fake nose for laughs, but this time he's fully sincere and fully menacing. If nothing else it leaves us wanting to see more." JJ Duncan , zimbio.com