Not even Depp and Bale can save an oddly disjointed and empty movie

Rating: 6/10 (2 October 2009)

Oh boy was I looking forward to this! I love gangster movies, I think Christian Bale is one of the best actors around, I think Johnny Depp is always decent, and I think Michael Mann is a great director. It seems a sure bet, a thing that could not go wrong.
Well. It did. Sort of. While "Public Enemies" is not a total disaster, it's not the new "Heat" that it should have been.
It seems that Micheal Mann has finally succumbed to the style over substance virus, turning Public Enemies into a movie that is almost entirely about atmosphere and fancy visuals. It worked in Collateral and Miami Vice, but this time Mann goes overboard and fails to provide a compelling narrative or characters to care about.
Instead, what we get is a fairly tiresome collection of one shoot-out and bank robbery after the other. A lot of people get shot, a lot of people die, but you very rarely have any idea who is being shot since none of the characters are introduced properly and they all look the same anyway. To make things worse, the editing is all over the place as well, with frequent jumps in time and space that are poorly explained, and whole sections of narrative apparently missing.
Depp and Bale are probably doing the best they can with what they are given, but they manage to be almost totally forgettable, a first for Depp and the second time for Bale (Terminator Salvation being the first). And Depp and Bale are the lucky ones, since the excellent supporting cast really has nothing of any interest to do, and the love story, which is given a prominent place in the marketing campaign, taking up a very minor part and being unconvincing to boot.
As much as I wanted to like this movie, I just couldn't. It's basically a collection of nicely choreographed and elaborate but very hard to follow gunfights after each other, with very little in terms of story or characters to tie them together. Worth seeing for the excellent production values, but not much more