Public Enemies

by KYW's Bill Wine

"Gangbusters" describes the subject matter of Public Enemies, but unfortunately not its quality level.
 
This high-profile crime drama from director Michael Mann has all its real-life ducks in a row.  But this fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the legendary John Dillinger, the nation's first "public enemy number one," lacks a certain spark. 
 
To say that the film romanticizes Dillinger's exploits and style is to understate the case -- he was seen by the  masses as a bank robber who was robbing the very banks that were robbing the public.  And that gave him a Robin Hook-like image in 1933, "the golden age of bank robbery."   That and his many against-all-odds jailbreaks made him a folk hero.
 
Johnny Depp (right) plays Dillinger, whom when we first meet him is engineering a daring escape of his cohorts from the Indiana State Penitentiary.
 
Christian Bale portrays intrepid G-man Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent placed in charge of a gangbusting operations by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) during the booming crime wave of the 1930s.
   
Purvis was to head up a team mandated to bring down not only Dillinger but also Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) and Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum).
 
And Marion Cotillard (Oscar winner in 2007 for La môme) plays coat-check clerk Billie Frechette, whom Dillinger falls for at first glance, relentlessly pursues, and talks into joining him on the lam.
 
Accomplished director Mann (Collateral, Ali, The Insider, Heat, Miami Vice) co-wrote the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman.  It's based on the nonfiction book by Bryan Burroughs, Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34.  
 
The script certainly offers a number of fascinating biographical and anecdotal details that are not exactly common knowledge.  But  the parallels between Dillinger and Purvis that it seems to aspire to delineate never quite register or amount to much.
 
And the film's downright glamorous depiction of the people and places that figure prominently in the story either belies or ignores the reality of the Great Depression.
 
Frankly, we're thus reminded throughout of how much more effectively such films as Bonnie and Clyde and The Untouchables handled similar thematic material and how much more adroitly they captured the period and the tenor of the times.
 
Mann's decision to shoot on high-definition video absolutely gives the (too) many gunfights a tense immediacy that they would not quite have on glossy film.  But the plot is almost lazily straightforward and thus overfamiliar from other crime-drama vehicles.
   
Two or three scenes feel fresh and ironic and nuanced, but we're looking for two to three times that many, if not more.
 
Depp's charisma and authority are on display as usual, but his immersion and inventiveness within the role is not up to his recent heady standards.
   
And Bale plods ahead as a straight arrow who sees colleagues crossing certain ethical lines in their treatment of prisoners during interrogations (post-9/11 echoes emerge, as you can imagine) without quite breathing life into his character.
   
Both performances are too retiring to gain our emotional involvement in the proceedings, and the film's two stars end up with precious little screen time together.
 
The plain truth is that we never really get to know these two perhaps unknowable principals, and that vacuum keeps us at arm's length from this superficially interesting but ultimately unsatisfying entertainment.
 
So we'll track down 2 stars out of 4 for a crime drama that is technically respectable, maybe even admirable, but nonetheless criminally remote.  It's not just that Public Enemies is shallow, it's that it lacks Depp.