I wanted it to be good, but I couldn't finish watching it

Rating: 4/10 (14 October 2009)

I was looking forward to seeing this movie since I first heard of it. Usually I won't see a movie just because of their actors, but in this case two of my favorite actors were up against each-other and that in a movie based upon a true story. That couldn't go wrong I figured, this had to be a great movie.
It wasn't.
The opening was OK, even though I rather have movies that start out slow. After that it just went downhill. The movie jumped from scene to scene and I had the constant feeling of having missed something, constantly hoping that things would become clear later, but that didn't happen. It was a simple linear story and it felt like it was told with multiple pages being skipped constantly. The love-story part felt very fake, unnecessary, uninteresting and even though it was probably meant to show who Dillinger was, it failed to do so. They could just as well put up a bullet-point list of his characteristics and it wouldn't be much less interesting. This already made me want to fast forward quite early in the movie.
And about the acting of both Bale and Johnny. It was boring. Somehow I got the feeling they were both bored too and couldn't hide that 100%. Even the scene where they first stood face, which I was looking forward too, was also very disappointing. It was more of a stare-off, while you'd expect them to have to say a lot to each other. I can understand that they couldn't have made much more from a shallow script, but it makes me wonder why they accepted playing this movie in the first place.
About the rest, the shots, the sound. Even though I saw a few comments on those I thought they were good, and made me watch as far as I got. The sound dynamics were annoying though, from whispering soft to incredibly loud and back again, but that seems to be the standard of movies these days.
Anyway, even though I understand it's not at all historically correct, the story might have had an OK ending. I just couldn't watch anymore after being thrown in yet another one of the many long unexciting shoot outs. Wanting something to be good can in many cases give you the idea something is better then it actually is, but in this case it was not enough to even keep me watching it. And a movie has to be very bad for me to turn it off, I usually finish everything.
So my advice is to skip this one, you're not missing out on much.