Good, but not great.

Rating: 7/10 (1 July 2009)

This movie has moments of greatness, but certain things hold it back from being as good as it could have been.
Casting: The good: Depp dominates the role of Dillinger, The brief moment we get Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd is stellar, Cotillard is amazing as Billie, and the best performance of the show IMO is Stephen Graham as a perfect psychotic Baby Face Nelson.
The Bad: Bale was miscast for a man who was small in stature and looks nothing like the brooding ominous Pruvis that the movie creates. Bill Camp is horrific as Frank Nitti not looking as imposing as Nitti truly was (his nickname was the enforcer) or even Italian for that matter.
Plotwise the character development of Dillinger needs work, we get told brief accounts of his past, but we see nothing and are given no emotional connections to his emotional mindset or reason he became the man he became, a major misstep. Connections between Dillinger and his close associates are never developed enough to feel the true pain of their deaths. The movie DOES pay off in the end with Dillingers own death scene and the reaction of Billie. A scene in the police station where Dillinger waltzes through the department focused on hunting him looking at pictures and asking the police the score to a baseball game was ludicrous, contrived, and unbelievable to the point of jarring one out of the immersion into the storyline.
The art direction of the movie is first rate though, you are IN the 1930's in this movie from the opening scene to the closing. The cars, the cloths, the guns, the food, everything just looks and feels 1930's. The one thing that might have been an improvement would be making the problems of the times more apparent, this was in the midst of economic lows such as America had never seen and the poverty that existed is hardly alluded to although it had a part to play in Dillinger's fame with the public.
All in all, a good movie, worth seeing, but one cannot help but feel it could have been a great movie with some of the above issues fixed. 7/10