20 Baffling IMDb Top 250 Placements You Won't Believe
6. The Departed
The Film:
A crime drama from Martin Scorsese which focuses on moles, police corruption and a game of cat and mouse. It won the Best Picture Oscar and finally got Martin Scorsese that elusive Best Director Oscar.
Placement: #40
The Departed is the second-highest rated Martin Scorsese film (after Goodfellas) on the Top 250. Yeah, that's right. Martin Scorsese's worst film is above Taxi Driver, Scorsese's masterpiece that is Raging Bull and The Wolf of Wall Street, with Silence and Hugo not even being on the list.
Quite how a watchable and often fun but otherwise fairly average crime thriller won Best Picture is already a perplexing question, but it being seen as the 40th best film of all time is something else. It's a shallow and largely unsophisticated film, and although Mark Wahlberg is excellent and Leonardo Dicaprio is great, Jack Nicholson overacts and Matt Damon sleepwalks.
There is simply no real justification to this one, and if it hadn't had such big stars and such a beloved director, no-one would remember it at all. Fine, so the Academy have treated Martin Scorsese very badly and consistently snubbed him. If they wanted to make up for that, that's fine. 2006 wasn't the best year for films anyway. But the IMDb users have nothing to apologize for and Martin Scorsese is on the Top 250 quite a bit. Just ridiculous.
Where It Should Be: It shouldn't be on the list. Sorry Marty.