I don't know how many British viewers have noticed, but over the last few months there have been a recent spate of repeats that even BBC 2 would balk at. I'm talking of feature films, notably Mr and Mrs Smith, Poseidon and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now, I know these are crowd pleasers, but are there royalties so little or have we reached saturation point in numbers of films that schedulers' minds are overloaded and can only retreat into a few guaranteed crowd-pleasers, rather than scanning the spectrum of filmology? The multiplicity of channels cannot cover all bases of such deja vu coincidence.
The Departed was a case in point last night. Not one of Scorsese's better films, but pretty tightly directed. Certainly not Best Picture but maybe worthy of a Best Director Oscar (I can't remember the competition that year, which tells its own story). The only trouble is (spoiler alert) that once Jack Nicholson's principal villain dies three-quarters of the way through, the dramatic tension gradually loosens, like a balloon slowly deflating. I am not totally aware of how faithful a remake it is (having seen a bit of the original Hong Kong movie), so it is possibly Nicholson's screen presence that dominates over Leonardo diCaprio and Matt Damon (among a stellar cast), making their dilemmas not so important once he is gone. The coda tries its best, but it's far too long. There are also some contrivances: of all the female police shrinks in all of Boston, diCaprio's and Damon's characters have to fall in love (and into bed) with the same one; I'll just leave this incriminating evidence on my desk in almost plain sight so my adversary will inevitably find it as I leave him in my office alone. Ultimately, it is the unsatisfactory ending that is truly damaging because until then it was a pretty decent silver screen offering, rendered merely decent.