Solid, but lacks imagination

Rating: 7/10 (10 May 2013)

Bryan Burrough's book, 'Public Enemies', was an exhaustive account of the wave of bank-robberies that afflicted America in the early 1930s, and the people who undertook them. In his forward, the author makes the interesting point that the story proceeded in an essentially modern world, a place with automatic weapons, automobiles, and air-planes. Michael Mann's film dramatises some of the book, concentrating on the person of John Dillinger, and it's a fairly typical Michael Mann film: heavyweight and solid, slightly over-glamorising its participants, pitching the tale as a personal fight between the lawman and the criminal (though to be fair, the book also does this to some extent) but somewhat emotionally unaffecting and impersonal. The sense of Dillinger as one-part folk-hero, one part cold-blooded murderer, never quite comes through as Mann prefers to show us a story of people just doing what they have to do (a world-view he also showed us in 'Heat'). This is a fairly true representation of what happened; but a little bit more creativity would not have gone amiss.