Public Enemies

John Dillinger...An American gangster... A man that I don't know much about but am very interested in. What a great idea for a film. Public Enemies, a Michael Mann Film, starring Johnny Depp as the notorious John Dillinger. I couldn't have been more excited but, I am sorry to say, I was very disappointed.

Michael Mann is one of my favorite writer/directors still doing it today. Mann has created a few masterpieces of his own including Heat and The Insider, making him, in my opinion, one of the best film auteurs of our time. Public Enemies is simply not one of his best pieces of work. His decision to use digital and mostly hand held cameras was plainly a bad choice. It didn't capture the essence of the 1930's and turned out to be a distracting film tecnique that took away from the movie.

Public Enemies seemed to begin towards the downfall of Dillinger's illustrious existence, and it seemed to take place over a very short period of time. I feel like this made the character development in this film very poor. You don't really get to know John Dillinger and the film didn't do a good job explaining why he was Public Enemy #1 opposed to Babyface Nelson or anyone else in his crew.

John Dillinger was a depression era bank robber whom the public admired. He only stole from the banks and he cared about the community because they were the people that he hid out amongst. I know that is how it really happened but it just felt like a really cliche storyline. Just another Jesse James.

The film became repetitive.....He gets caught, he escapes, he gets caught again, he escapes again, and then he dies. Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) the lead agent assigned to track Dillinger down seems to always be a step ahead of him. John Dillinger did not come across as a criminal mastermind at all. And in the middle of all that they throw in a kind of dull love story.

Despite my previous comments, I didn't exactly hate the film. I thought it was well acted and some of the shootouts and jailbreaks were very good. They were not few, but they were short and far between. Bottom line, I didn't really learn much about Dillinger that I didn't already know. I felt like the trailer basically shows everything in the film. It was poorly directed, the screenplay was weak and I would recommend waiting for DVD to see this one.

Trailer