REEL CRITICS:Jack’s back, and with a decent cast in ‘The Departed’

This could be the year director Martin Scorsese finally gets an Oscar.

His new crime thriller “The Departed” is flawlessly crafted, from the crackling screenplay to the photography and editing, and it affords his actors the chance to do their best work in years.

Based upon the Hong Kong action flick “Infernal Affairs,” the film centers around two young state police officers from Boston and how their lives change course when a crime kingpin crosses their paths.

Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is a former altar boy full of ambition and boyish charm who is assigned to the special investigations unit that’s working to bring down legendary bad boy Frank Costello.

Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) had a conflicted childhood. In his first meeting with Capt. Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sgt. Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), he’s told that he’ll never last as a “statie,” which is Boston slang for a state police officer. But in the next breath, he’s offered a chance to go deep undercover and ingratiate himself in Costello’s organization.

The story plays with several interesting pairings of good cop versus bad cop, always punctuated by explosive violence that keeps the tension mounting. You never know whom to trust.

DiCaprio and Damon are excellent and bring a new maturity and depth to their characters. Wahlberg and Alec Baldwin are standouts as perhaps two of the last honest detectives around. No wonder they’re always angry.

And then there’s Jack Nicholson. As Frank Costello, he is the devil in animal-print pajamas. But he and Scorsese have a propensity to go over the top, and some scenes have no relevance except to give Jack a chance to showboat.

But in those first great opening minutes, when you hear that voice that could charm a snake out of its skin, you realize this is the guy we all came to see.

The quality of the film and the subject matter is of such poor quality that you wonder why it has made it this far, except that it has a political agenda. That is made very clear by the continuous comments about President Bush’s nomination of Judge Samuel Alito as the evangelical choice for the U.S. Supreme Court.

I was offended by the movie. The movie sets out that there are 80 million evangelical Christians in this country, and that they are all just like the ones depicted in this movie. The film took a small sect of low-IQ extremists — led by a pastor who rocks back and forth constantly like a lunatic in an asylum — and portrays them as the face of evangelicals across America.

Not only that, the film contends that this group of ill-educated fundamentalists is out to take over America and that unless the rest of us wake up, we will become victims of their extremist agenda. It links what evangelicals are doing with their children with the terrorist training camps in the Middle East. Talk about extremist!

In following up with some of the people portrayed in the film, they claim the directors took comments that were meant as jokes and sidebars and made a doctrine out of them.

Ted Haggard, who is portrayed in the film, says that he and others were purposely and humorously mimicking some of the negative stereotypes of evangelicals, and that these stereotypes were used to prove that Haggard was an example of these stereotypes.

I sat in the Anaheim mayor’s prayer breakfast last week and listened to respected Jewish radio talk show host Dennis Prager. Prager opened his talk by asking why America is so afraid of the conservative right. He said that this country was founded by the conservative right who defined religious freedom in this country that we all now enjoy. His question was, “Why do we think that after 200 years they are going to do anything different?”

If you are interested in seeing a political film that will get you all fired up and paranoid about the religious Republican freaks who are out to control the minds of your children and control this country, then go see this film. If you are tired of the media manipulating truth for a personal agenda, then go see something else.

is a Newport Beach resident who is the lead pastor of the Beacon, a Baptist church in Anaheim. Olsen is also a regular contributor to the Pilot’s In Theory column, which runs Saturdays.

‘Jesus Camp’ is more politics than religionWitness another shot across the bow of the culture wars. Make no mistake, “Jesus Camp” is as political in its agenda as Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which also explains why it is out just before next month’s elections.