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"Public Enemies" doesn't live up to the hype
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Purvis lurks outside the Biograph; photo from Universal Pictures
You know those movies that, when watching them, you just love them, but when you think about them later on you can’t really identify what you thought was so great about them? Well, Michael Mann’s new gangster flick “Public Enemies” is a perfect example.
The film, based on real events, takes place in the early 1930s. The Great Depression is in full swing, and crime is on the rise. John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is one of the gangsters taking part in the crime wave, and he and his cronies rob bank after bank, amid shootouts, evading the police, and breaking out of jail. Hoping to prove the worth of his new agency, J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) puts one of his best men, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) in charge of capturing Dillinger, who, though charged as being a menace to society, actually inspired many Depression-weary Americans, who saw him as a sort of hero. In the meantime, Dillinger falls in love with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a hat-check girl who starts to accompany him on his adventures, despite the danger she knows she’s in.
A few other gangsters are featured in the film, including Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd and Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson, but the focus is really on Dillinger. Depp, who always seems to play an entirely different character in every one of his movies, delivers a wonderful performance, capturing Dillinger’s combination of charisma and menace. His face shows that he knows he is doomed, yet he continues to be carefree. Cotillard proves that her Best Actress Oscar for “La Vie en Rose” was well deserved, as she is able to hold her own against Depp and depict her character’s somewhat unstable emotions. Bale, however, falls flat, and doesn’t add anything special to his character. The rest of the supporting cast is average, though it was often hard to tell who was who.
Many people seem to have a problem with the way the film was shot, and, while it is a bit disorienting to watch at first, the single, shaky camera really gives the movie more of a documentary feel, as if some guy was following Dillinger and Purvis with his camera. Several parts of the movie are actually quite stunning, especially when Dillinger reflects on recent events and people in his life while sitting in Chicago’s Biograph Theatre, watching the Clark Gable/William Powell gangster movie, “Manhattan Melodrama”. The sets, props, and costumes are also spectacular, and create a world that feels authentic.
However, while the film’s many shootouts are immensely entertaining, they are ultimately the reason why the movie doesn’t work. There are almost too many gunfights, and not a lot in between them, so that in the end, the viewer doesn’t really know anything about any of the characters. We don’t get a sense of what kind of people Frechette, Purvis, and Dillinger really are, leaving the audience in the end with little more than some two-dimensional characters shooting each other every few minutes.
While it’s great to see a more nontraditional action movie being released amidst the other summer blockbusters, it’s going to have to be better than this to hold up against the season’s bigger releases.
2 ½ out of 4 stars. Runtime: 140 minutes. Rated R for gangster violence and some language.
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