Hint - It's generally a good idea to figure out what your movie is about BEFORE you start production.

Rating: 5/10 (7 October 2010)

This summer blockbuster is really a little film that never decided what it wanted to be when it grew up.
Johnny Depp plays Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, the man whose wide ranging crime spree across the Midwest made him public enemy #1 of the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dillinger was the most famous of a generation of outlaws who used the new technologies of fast cars and faster guns to recreate the Wild West in the 20st century heartland. Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent obsessed with capturing Dillinger dead or alive. Marion Cotillard plays Billie Frechette, the poor Chicago girl Dillinger falls in love with at first sight, promising to whisk her away to a life of excitement and adventure.
Public Enemies starts out strongly, with Dillinger staging a bold prison break to free his gang but the story wanders into the wilderness after that and never makes it back to the main trail. It drops us into the midst of Dillinger's bank robbery career without preparation or explanation, immediately launches the FBI into the mix, throws in Dillinger's relationship with Billie, adds a bit of the uneasy union between the Dillinger gang and the organized crime in Chicago that was coalescing out of post-Prohibition, spices things up with fairly blatant yet surprisingly vague allusions to the socioeconomic dynamics of that age, tosses in a splash of anthropological theorizing about the rise of institutions crowding out the individual act and even stirs in some garden variety treachery and betrayal. The film is always going in so many directions that it never ends up anywhere.
For example, both Billie Frechette and Melvin Purvis and the FBI are major elements of the movie from the very start through to the end. Yet, while Billie may have been important to John Dillinger the man, she's irrelevant to his story. She doesn't really play a major role in anything that happens to him and could be lifted out of the film entirely without losing much. Likewise, Purvis and the FBI aren't much of a factor until the later stages of Dillinger's criminal career, yet this film highlights them like they were breathing down Dillinger's neck all the time. So, for the first three-quarters of the movie, the FBI stands around talking about Dillinger but never accomplishes anything. Much of that last quarter of the film is also devoted to the idea that organized crime is growing and pushing out flamboyant outlaws like Dillinger, but while that may be an interesting point of discussion, it contributes very little dramatically.
Public Enemies tries to focus on Dillinger the man, the myth, the popular phenomenon, the historical symbol and the cultural linchpin all equally. The result is a story that never gives you enough in any of those categories. It's like the filmmakers never decided if this was a period drama, a biography, a social commentary or even whether it was a summer blockbuster or some small independent flick. So while they've got a lot of interesting parts, they never build anything with them.
I think the core of this movie was supposed to be the contrast of Purvis and Dillinger, not as good vs. evil but as competing societal forces. Dillinger was supposed to be freedom and personal power but also selfishness, irresponsibility and barbarism. Purvis was supposed to represent justice and order, but also oppression and control. I think the story was meant to be about how America in the 1930s was starting to shift from a Dillinger world to a Purvis civilization and how that was a mix of good and bad. But these filmmakers either gave up on that idea or added in so much nonessential stuff that it got lost.
Director Michael Mann also made extensive use of hand held digital cameras in making this film, so in many respects it looks more like something on TV than a big screen film. On the one hand, that gives some of the more traditionally shot scenes a strong sense of realism. On the other hand, some scenes look like they were filmed by a local TV news camera crew. And not one from the good station in town, but from that 3rd place station nobody watches.
There are a lot of individual moments in Public Enemies that are entertaining, however you can't say that about the entire movie. If you're willing to indulge this film's faults, you'll probably enjoy it. If you're more demanding than that, you'll probably be disappointed.