Poorly executed, "flat" direction of otherwise great actors - a lot of gripe

Rating: 5/10 (10 July 2009)

I cannot understand the Michael Mannns choice in shooting Public Enemies in close up Dogma 95 style, with hand-held cameras, ultra closeups throughout the film. If you shoot a film like that, you gotta give room for your characters to develop their on screen persona.
Through Michael Mann's direction both Johnny Depp (Dilinger) and Christian Bale (FBI agent Melvin Purvis), delivers cardboard flat uninteresting characters, utilizing both, otherwise great actors imho, very very poorly.
When doing a film about such a iconic era, as the thirties, it clashes with the up close and personal style in the film. There's no chance to look at the scenery, the sets, backgrounds etc. Of course you get a very personal look of the film, but then it could just as well have been set in contemporary times. Its a shame, because it looked like they really did put a lot of effort into portraying the roaring thirties, certainly the cars look great :)
Other than that, the audio editing Really sucked. Audio dropouts several times (that I noticed), varying levels throughout, attuning volume abruptly to accommodate speaking etc.
Also I feel the editing was somewhat botched. As other posts noticed, there's a great cast of actors (Giovanni Ribisi, Stephen Lang, Stephen Dorff and others) who you almost don't see in the film. To top it all off, I don't think the action scenes were very well edited, a lot of the fluidity were lost in shoddy editing.
I still think it wasn't a total waste of time going to the local cinema and watch it. Time specific pieces like that, with a healthy mix of Jazz, violence, broads and Tommy Guns always sparks something in me. But this wont get anywhere above a 5 star rating from me.