Film

There’s A Petition To Change The Famously Bad Ending Of ‘The Departed’

The world's worst ending might be getting a makeover.

by Joseph Earp  20 February 2019
The final scene of The Departed might be getting a makeover

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The general consensus on The Departed (also known as The Dehpahted if you’re real Boston born and bred) is that it’s a very good film with a very bad ending.

And no, that’s not ‘ending’ as in last scene , that’s ‘ending’ as in very final shot. After some two hours of Martin Scorsese-directed bloody shenanigans, a film about a rat infiltrating the Boston police department and a separate rat infiltrating Boston’s biggest criminal gang closes with a shot of a literal rat — like, the four-legged animal — running across a balcony.

It is extraordinarily silly. Not that ‘silly’ is a problem in and of itself: after all, one of the greatest films ever made features Sean Connery in a red piece of bondage gear and a ponytail chasing giant stone floating heads (here’s a picture for your files).

So no, the problem isn’t that it’s silly — it’s that it’s abruptly silly. Everything that has come before has been bloody, and intense, and dramatic, and then boom — you’re suddenly watching a film fall over itself to explain its themes to you.

Anyway, not content to live in a world where The Departed morphs into a first-year film lecture in its final shot, one plucky film fan has launched a Kickstarter to digitally erase the rat from the end of the film.

The fan is looking to raise AU$5,623, which seems like a lot until you realise that the process is deeply complicated: it’ll require buying a blu-ray of The Departed, buying a blu-ray player, a bunch of blank blu-rays, and the services of Ed Mundy, a digital effects supervisor.

“I’m paying Ed $599 dollars, because if you pay someone $600 dollars or more, the IRS requires you to send them a 1099 MISC form at the end of the year, and that’s too much work for me,” the fan writes.

Listen, it’s certainly true that there are more valuable ways that you could spend your money. But it’s also true that the final shot of The Departed really, really sucks.

So really, the choice makes itself.