John Dillinger turned robbing banks into an art form.
While the movie "Public Enemies" shows his more violent side - taking hostages and shooting anyone who got in his way - Dillinger also demonstrated some style. For example, he once posed as a sales representative for a company that sold bank alarm systems. Using this ruse, he would enter banks, assess their security systems and later rob them. His gang also once pretended to be a film company scouting locations for a bank robbery scene. They then perpetrated a real robbery as bystanders looked on smiling.
Unfortunately, these scenes don't appear in "Public Enemies." Director Michael Mann focuses instead on Dillinger's physicality as a bank purloiner, leaping on top of counters, threatening bank employees and blasting his way out of jams.
While one can find plenty to appreciate in this Dillinger film - there have been several versions, most notably the 1973 movie starring Warren Oates - this critic wanted more - more background, more character development, more chemistry, more coherence.
In "Public Enemies," the relationship between Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) is particularly problematic.
In one scene, Dillinger confronts Frechette at a nightclub where she works as a coat-check girl. When a customer interrupts their conversation with a request for his coat, Dillinger goes ballistic on the poor chap. Maybe I'm too old-fashioned, but most women might have second thoughts about going steady with a man given to such needless acts of cruelty. Unless the woman had her own sadistic streak.
Since we only learn the bare basics of Frechette's past, we don't know if she has a weakness for bad boys or an inclination for bad behavior. The movie also conveniently leaves out the fact that Dillinger was previously married. Note that Faye Dunaway's Bonnie Parker in "Bonnie and Clyde" had a few issues with sanity and authority.
Nitpickers may even wonder about the film's title. If you're expecting to see other Depression Era public enemies besides Dillinger, look fast because they don't spend much time on the screen. Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) gets gunned down after running in an apple orchard for a few seconds. Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi) turns up in two brief scenes and Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) spends more time maniacally shooting people than talking.
Mann instead concentrates on a cat-and-mouse game with agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) relentlessly and methodically hunting down Dillinger. If you're wondering what makes Mel tick, you won't find any answers here. For example, how does a South Carolina lawyer become a sharpshooting lawman?
The film also only briefly touches on Dillinger's folk hero status where he was seen by some as a modern-day Robin Hood, stealing from banks at a time when the general populace had more animosity than money in these institutions.
The film does show Dillinger as a loyal friend, who brazenly busts colleagues out of a penitentiary, and a devoted lover who returns to Billie in Chicago even as the city is teeming with cops, informants and mobsters who want the high-profile Dillinger out of the way. If he weren't such a ruthless killer, Dillinger appears to an OK guy.
Mann reserves most of his venom for J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), who's in the process of establishing the FBI. Here, we see him take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that transpires. The word "scruples" is not in his vocabulary. He's also portrayed as a shameless media whore.
The film does contain a number of excellent scenes. One takes place in a movie theater in which a public service announcement shows Dillinger's face on the screen while the announcer says Dillinger could be sitting among you. And he is! Another occurs later in the film in which Dillinger walks into a police station, calmly looks around and even asks a group of cops listening to a Cubs baseball game on the radio who's winning. The crook had chutzpah.
The acting fares better than the storytelling with Depp proving he can play more than a pirate channeling Keith Richards. Cotillard impresses also, demonstrating that her Oscar win for her portrayal of Edith Piaf was no fluke. As for Bale, he continues to play intense characters who would rather have their eyes gouged out with a melon baller than crack a smile. In this film, his lips almost make an upward turn at one point.
Action aficionados should enjoy the numerous shootout scenes with bullets riddling walls, tree trunks and bodies. They may be less enamored with the film's 2<+>1<+>/<->2<->-hour running time.
Mann fans, meanwhile, expecting to see a tension-packed film such as "Collateral" and "Heat" get instead a more visceral movie. Call it "Chicago Vice."
As the smoke from the blazing guns dissipates and the ending credits roll, you may exit the theater wondering about the film's intensions. Is it a biopic? Not really. A love story? Not entirely. A 1930s version of "The Fugitive"? Possibly.
"Public Enemies" clearly wants to be more than a standard gangster film. In many ways, it surpasses its B-movie brethren. In others, it employs a tommy gun to shoot itself in the foot.
"Public Enemies" is now playing.
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"Public Enemies"
Starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard
Rated R (for gangster violence and some language), 140 minutes
Directed by Michael Mann
