Public Enemies

Public Enemies [2009]

Director: Michael Mann
Actor: Johnny DeppChristian BaleMarion CotillardJason ClarkeStephen DorffGiovanni RibisiStephen LangDon FryeBilly CrudupStephen Graham

I really wanted to like this film but I couldn’t. With a pretty stellar cast and one of my favourite directors, I was waiting for weeks and weeks for the spark to kindle the flame within me, but it never happened. Not that this film didn’t have its moments, and I will try to remain fair as I collect my thoughts about it.

.: Disappointing
The story is that of John Dillinger (Depp), the notorious bankrobber who gained notoriety as the most wanted man of the United States and J. Edgar Hoover (Crudup), the founder and director of the FBI, his personal nemesis and thorn in his side. He was well-connected and charismatic enough to have the public on his side, and while people were starving due to the great depression he was seen as a Robin Hood character who did what others only dreamt of. The film follows his downfall, only showing a small part of his rise to riches and infamy, which is, to me one of the fundamental problems of the film. More traditional films that tell the story of a bad guy — especially one as charismatic as Dillenger — is that usuually the audience gets the chance to get to know the character and to share in their success before the fall sets in. You become invested and you feel like part of the team, or in this case, the gang. Not here. The film starts when Dillinger is already successful and quite well known, even though later you find that only a short time has passed since he came off a nine year stretch for knocking over a grocery store for a fifty dollar haul. Not exactly the mark of a professional bank robber. Anyway. So the film feels like one big decline.

On the other side of the story is FBI special agent Melvin Purvis (Bale), who quickly rises through the Feds ranks as a promising soldier in the war on crime that Hoover just declared. He starts heading the Chicago office and is charges with the apprehension of Dillinger. He is provided the next generation in law men, more CSI that The Shield, relying more on brain than brawn. I was glad the approach failed and the got some back up from some Texan hardballers with some spit in their eye and grit in their gut, otherwise it would have been very, very dull. (I was very happy to see my man Don Frye as one of the hardcases — an MMA pioneer!) and so the rather one-sided cat and mouse game starts.

The acting was, unfortunately rather bland and stereotyped with hard men talk either like cowboys or with an unnatural amount of gravel in the back of their throats. Ribisi, who I was glad to see make an short appearance in two scenes as a train robber looking to enlist Dillinger and his gang for a job, was probably the worst of them, but even Depp overdid it a little bit, which is fine when he’s doing Jack Sparrow, but here it seemed out of place. Apart from that Depp did a great nob playing the shwashbuckling bankrobber, charming as ever but withou many means to showcase his talents. There is exactly one scene with some gravitas and that’s pretty short. It had occurred to me that men from that era hardly showed their emotions to begin with, so perhaps the lack of it wasn’t an oversight but was by design. Somehow I find that hard to believe since they tried to tie in a love story. (Oh, I didn’t mention that yet? Must’ve made an impression on me.)

Bale gets absolutely no opportunity to shine, and the scenes that he shares with Depp he is overshadowed. His whole character is meant to be that of the stiff law man, which is why at the start of the film, in his first scene, he’s out-acted by Channing Tatum for chrissakes! Purvis shoots Pretty Boy Floyd (Tatum) in the back as he tries to flee. Standing over him, Purvis tries to get the wounded Floyd to betray his friends without appealing to…well, anything sensible. So Floyd spits on him in dramatic fashion and dies. Throughout the entire exchange Purvis hardly changes expression. To borrow a phrase from U.S. congressman Barney Frank; “It was like having a discussion with a dining table.” Anyway, not the most memorable performance from the man who brought you The Machinist and American Psycho. I guess even great actors can have a bad day.

Luckily, there are some nice surprises in the film as well. The relatively unknown (to me) Jason Clarke, who plays Red Hamilton, one of Dillinger’s side-kicks. He doesn’t get a lot of scenes, but the ones he does get made me take notice. Also, Stephen Graham, the guy who played Tommy in Snatch, plays the deranged and sociopathic Baby Face Nelson, and does so very, verywell. Although he didn’t really show his stuff, like Ribisi, I was glad to see Stephen Dorff again, as the slick, con-man Homer, and then there was Domenick Lombardozzi, Branka Katic, John Ortiz and especially Stephen Lang as the hard-nosed Texan law man Winstead, who was amazing. Sadly, none of these people had roles big enough to lift the film from its depression.

.: A Matter of Direction
It’s interesting to look over all these names since I recognise a lot of them from Miami Vice, which Mann also directed. People who know me know that I dig Michael Mann and his direction, Miami Vice (TV), Miami Vice the movie, Heat,Collateral, The Insider, Crime Story (TV), Thief…hell, I even watched L.A. Takedown, the precursor to Heat. I loved all of it. After watching this film it comes as no surprise that I never saw his other big hit, The Last of the Mohicans, because I always felt that this guy should stick to what he really excels at, which is crime stories. Over the years, and throughout his career, no director has shown himself to have such an understanding of modern day crime and be able to put it in such a cinematic light. When you think of crime films, you quickly end up at the likes of John Woo, who does a mean crime film, but it’s always a bit absurd and romanticized, like he’s directing an epic tragedy — which I suppose he is. He never gets the nitty and the gritty, or the technical details down on film properly, which is what Mann can do like no other. It doesn’t look good, it’s not sexy and he makes it look slightly mundane and routine, like a job, only illegal.

And so he attempted to do the same with this film, and you could say that he’s the guy for the job, and in places he did manage. Especially with the relation between Dillinger and several other crews, like Ribisi’s trainrobber’s crew, and the mafia, is all really well done. Sadly, Mann really “grew up” on the crime in the seventies and got into his own during the crime-waves of the eighties and nineties. He shouldn’t try to apply the same rules to other eras. I think it’d be easier for him to move forward along the timeline instead of moving backwards. The new millennium will probably have elements of crime that he’s not too familiar with — though he did do an awfully good job on Miami Vice, and incorporated technology and new tracking mechanisms pretty well, so perhaps I’m talking out of my ass. He didn’t, however, manage with Public Enemies…unfortunately. I really wanted to like this film but I couldn’t.


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