Not actually bad, but not good.

Rating: 5/10 (2 July 2009)

This film is a disappointment. Johnny Depp is rather good as the bank robber John Dillinger, and Christian Bale is not bad as Melvin Purvis, the agent chasing him. However, put simply, it feels rushed. The cinematography is ineffective and spastic, and the editing fails to make the story interesting. Perhaps these things needed more time given to them. It's actually boring, which is not what's expected of a gangster film. Without that attention to detail, it ends up simplistic but busy, a bad combination.
The director of photography also did LA Confidential, so it's difficult to blame him for the uninteresting look of the movie. There are two chase scenes which echo each other, one through an orchard during the day and one through the woods at night, which were done well. Most of the action scenes are just bullets spraying everywhere while people run around, with only rare attention paid to constructing a coherent sequence of events. The camera is far too jerky, far too often. Michael Mann is probably to blame for all of this, as the director.
Weak story, uninteresting flow, and visuals without enough punch add up to make this one a waste of time.