The Quintessential Masterpiece...The Greatest Motion Picture of All Time

Rating: 10/10 (4 July 2009)

Let me start by saying this: 'Public Enemies' is exactly what a gangster flick should be. It is genuine, heartfelt realism at its finest with a pulse that never lets up and never ceases to strangle the viewer. Not once in my entire life has a movie captured my imagination and my heart with every single solitary frame. It is the only movie ever made that succeeds in creating fully realized, well-rounded, graphically fleshed-out characters without ever touching upon a single hint of back story (aside from a quick second of dialogue from the 'Maestro of Robbery' himself that reads something like this: "I grew up on a farm. My mother died and my father beat me because he knew no other way to raise me."). Never has a book been able to accomplish this feat. Never has any story I've encountered (and that's quite a grandiose collection of stories, given that I'm a writer myself) been able to reach the heights of this brilliance. The sheer magnitude of the experience has left me dumbstruck.
The film begins and ends centered around John Dillinger. Every other character, aside from Billie, Dillinger's "Blackbird", is just a sideshow for the main attraction. Christian Bale's Melvin Purvis fades into nothingness cloaked in the failure to capture his prey, the failure to appease his guilt...and the failure to entertain the audience. But that doesn't matter. Because each of Purvis' moments on screen belong to Dillinger, and Dillinger alone. Purvis, like all the rest of us, is just a passenger along for the ride of his life. Never is he able to escape, even (I suspect) after one of his agents kills Dillinger near the end of the film. Billie shares the same fate. While she sits in her cell after Dillinger's death, the agent who shot him enters and sits with her, at Dillinger's request (his last). He gives her a message straight from his last stage (the stage of his demise, outside the theatre in his favorite town to hold up): "Bye bye, Blackbird." And the film cuts to black, leaving us with our hearts in our throats and our fingers clutched on the armrests. And so ends the masterpiece unlike any other, far too soon as it is unfortunately unable to last forever.