Black Mass might not be a great movie, but there's probably at least one guy who likes it even less than our reviewer did, and that's the real life gangster James "Whitey" Bulger.
Of course, he hasn't seen the movie, and he probably never will considering he's serving two life sentences and seems to hate the idea of its existence. He refused to communicate with Johnny Depp, who portrays him, in any way while the movie was being made.
Here's a statement his attorney gave to People, saying Bulger, 85, has zero plans to watch the movie even if it somehow makes its way to the Florida prison where he's being held.
“Johnny Depp might as well have been playing the Mad Hatter all over again as far as James Bulger is concerned,” the lawyer, Hank Brennan says. “Hollywood greed is behind the rush to portray my client, and the movie missed the real scourge created in my client’s case, the real menace to Boston during that time and in other mob cases around the country – the federal government’s complicity in each and every one of those murders with the top echelon informant program.”
As for Bulger's former associates who have seen the movie, they're saying it's mostly fiction.
“We really did kill those people,” Kevin Weeks, the former "right-hand man" to Bulger during the heyday of their Winter Hill Gang in Boston, said to The Daily Beast. Other that he says it's a "fantasy." He's played by Breaking Bad actor Jesse Plemons in the film.
"The only resemblance to Whitey’s character was the hairline. The funny thing is, Whitey’s look didn’t really change at all, just his clothes. It’s like we were stuck in a time warp. And the mannerisms—the way that Whitey talked to us—he never swore at us. In all the years I was with that man, he never swore at me once. We never yelled at each other."
The whole interview, including Weeks' account of what really went down in the scene where Depp's Bulger strangles a woman, is at The Daily Beast.
