never affecting, exciting, or engaging at any point

Rating: 5/10 (6 July 2009)

Well, after the disappointment of Miami Vice I had high hopes for a rebound. After all, Michael Mann made a legendary and stylish cops and robbers movie in Heat, and Johnny Depp and Christian Bale should at a minimum provide an entertaining night at the movies.
Unfortunately, Public Enemies fails to deliver. I was pretty much in the same neutral emotional state from the first frame to the last. What's missing is detail which would make anything you're seeing interesting. Period detail, plot detail, historic detail, even actual image detail. All are absent. (You are given WAY too much pore detail, though, due to the movie's continuous, annoying use of close-ups -- again detracting from any perspective.) Rather, the whole movie feels like a big, slow montage.
You're never given enough historical context to understand the meaning of John Dillinger in American society, or why we might care; you never get a sense of how long his crime spree lasted; his bank jobs aren't laid out with any specifics; there's no genuine sense of smart cat and mouse. On the other side, you never get a strong sense of FBI methodology, what motivates Purvis, or anything that differentiates any of the supporting characters from any others. Or what it is that Dillinger's lady loves in him. There's just no...detail.
Also, fairly shockingly for a Michael Mann film, it looks terrible, especially the nighttime sequences, which look taped, like an episode of COPS. I don't know how an aesthete like Mann could be satisfied with it, but as a moviegoer, I wasn't.
The movie was also marred by an overbearing, repetitious, near-constant score. No, really. It never lets up -- a clue that what's happening on screen isn't moving enough on its own.
The good news is that despite being given so little to work with, Johnny Depp is credible and enjoyable. Christian Bale was fine too.
Public Enemies wasn't as bad as Miami Vice, but like that movie, characters and topics are presented as though you should be interested and believe in them by default, not because they earn your interest and belief. Like they did in Heat.
In sum, I don't know how you can make a movie about a legendary bank robber and fail to make it exciting. But that's exactly what Michael Mann has done here. Bummer.