Review: Pretty 'Public Enemies'

Watching a Tommy-gun carrying Johnny Depp strut stylishly into a marble-lined bank as bank robber John Dillinger in the beautifully shot, occasionally exhilarating Public Enemies, you feel a little envious. For Depression-era Americans, Dillinger was the folk hero who made rich banks cough up the dough and made spectacular getaways. Who do we, living through the worst economic downturn since then, get for a celeb outlaw? Bernie Madoff.

But Dillinger-as-folk-hero is not really the point of Public Enemies. Director Michael Mann (director of the testosterone-dripping Miami Vice and Heat) is more interested in showcasing Dillinger and the men who went after him during his last crime spree as dudes obsessed with their particular missions and willing to risk all to win—straight-arrow FBI agent Melvin Purvis (a typically tight-assed Christian Bale) and the pedantic FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, played by a brilliant and hilarious Billy Crudup. (Also keep your eye out for the underrated John Ortiz as a book-making Italian gangster who sees Dillinger as a business-killing pest). In Mann’s view, they are similar, driven at testosterone level by the same impulses.

Depp is elegant and charming as Dillinger, whose own motivation is to have “everything, right now,” the line he uses to woo a coat-check girl (a beguiling French Oscar winner Marion Cotillard, practicing her English). His Dillinger is driven, ballsy, loyal to his friends—and low-key, as is, surprisingly, much of the movie. That, of course, makes the action scenes—some of the best in recent movie memory—pop all the more.

The street shootouts are tight and thrilling, and shot at head level, from the point of view of both the cops and the criminals. In one breathtaking nighttime sequence that takes place in a large log house and the surrounding woods, Dillinger and his crew fight it out with Purvis and his agents: Tommy guns explode, generating cartoon-like flame-outs, glass shatters, bullets crack in the still air and splinter tree bark and the men chase each other like hunters and game. Mann doesn’t shy away from showing bullet holes to the brain, pulling in close on a choking, dying gangster, but it’s all so pretty you hardly feel it. Public Enemies is not a terribly deep bio of Dillinger but it sure is pretty.

ON THE UP: HOT 'PUBLIC ENEMIES'