Public Enemies

Review by Loc

I wonder if it’s a reflection of my local public school education that I don’t know John Dillinger’s story. I also wonder if it’s a reflection of my movie viewing habits that I haven’t seen any of the Dillinger movies that preceded Michael Mann’s latest effort. What I do know is that the prospects of seeing Captain Jack Sparrow square off against Batman in a Heat-like cops-and-robbers showdown is too good to pass up. Quick hit: unfortunately, this flick was flat like the 2-liter bottle of Coke that you find at the back of your fridge from last year’s barbeque.

Public Enemies presents a simple enough premise: John Dillinger is the larger than life reality villain of the 1930s and Melvin Purvis is the forgotten G-man that brought him down. However, with a skilled filmmaker like Mann helming this flick, only good things could come out of your charismatic bad guy going up against your angsty good guy, right?

Wrong. Public Enemies plays out like a film student’s overly ambition passion project that tries to offer lots of zest, but fails to provide any meat and misses on most of the zest. Most glaring is the “innovative” film techniques peppered throughout the flick. Starting with the opening scene and continuing haphazardly throughout the film, you get unsteady hand-cam action full of in-their-face close-ups, nauseous-inducing bouncing, and random HD-Cloverfield-handy-cam shots that completely take you out of the film. If there’s one thing I’ve picked up over the years of pseudo-film study it’s that movies are an extreme form of escapism. You suspend your belief to transport yourself into the fictional story before you. So it doesn’t do much good when a period piece offers up super-technology like HD-shots and bouncing, fake documentary framing in shots. Bad choices abound.

What about Johnny Depp as Dillinger? Well, he looks cool. It’s been too long since Depp chopped his hair and kept a clean, chiseled look for the audience, but here he does it well. Yet, for all his looks, the natural charisma seems stifled and suffocated under the weight of portraying the real-life figure. Since the material offers little leeway, Depp is boxed up as he humanizes the larger-than-life Dillinger. If the movie keeps saying how big of a bad-boy celebrity he is, why does he come off as a Joe Schmoe. Sure, maybe that’s the point, but it doesn’t offer much to watch.

On the flip-side to that coin, Christain Bale steps in as Melvin Purvis. In what can only be described as a moving mannequin role, Bale sure does fill out his finely tailored suits well. Other than that, he does a lot of staring, speaks a little in a heavy Southern/Texan accent, and that’s about it. You could have had anyone in this role and it would have been the same. However, it does get you to start thinking, maybe Bale is just flat in general. He plays Batman as a constipated, growling thing and Bruce Wayne as a flat, overly-serious, self-important guy. As John Connor, he showed more emotion while yelling at a grip than in the actual movie. Maybe Bale is just kinda there.

Are there good heist scenes at least? Not really. There’s two, maybe three action scenes, and these consist of walking into a bank, slapping a couple guards around, then making off in an old car. When Dillinger says it takes him one minute and forty seconds to complete a job, I guess they meant to keep that realistic. You get a way more dramatic scene in the first five minutes of The Dark Knight. And you get the end-all-be-all heist in the middle of Heat. In Public Enemies, you get little to nothing.

Overall, Public Enemies is just kind of there. Michael Mann makes a movie once ever couple of years because he gets so involved in the process. You can bet that everything on film is as close to real as you’re gonna see. However, he’s also made the same cops-and-robbers themed film several times. Unfortunately, he hit the peak with Heat and everything since then has been blah. Miami Vice was simply horrendous, long, drawn out, and boring. Public Enemies doesn’t fare much better, with flat flat stuff being shot in stupid ways. Out of a 100 second heist, Public Enemies gets caught with a mediocre 50 second botched job. You can safely avoid this one.