A bit of a disappointment....

Rating: 7/10 (6 January 2010)

You've been living under a rock if you don't already know quite a bit about Mann's latest film.
I'll just add that I was disappointed in several aspects of the film. This is unfortunate, as I consider myself somewhat of a fan of Mann's.
The first negative is the emphasis on overt melodrama. (This is quite ironic, since there are several scenes from "Manhattan Melodrama," the last film that Dillinger saw, in the movie. It's almost as if Mann was overtly telling the audience that this would be a MM for the 2000s.)
Also, I wouldn't mind the cornpone storyline so much if it were historically accurate. Unfortunately, it is not. It is one thing to fantasize about characters in a fictional story (as in "Heat"), but Dillinger, and virtually all the other characters in this movie, were real people and they did real (and, in most cases, historically verifiable) things. The non-fictional aspects of the Dillinger story are exciting enough. Why was it necessary to jazz them up for this movie? It certainly wasn't done to improve the pacing of the story.
Finally, what's with the sound and the cinematography? Mann, and others associated with the film, state that the quality of the digital photography was deliberately chosen and used for effect. What? The rectangular digital anomalies (like photocopy screening) were deliberate? What was that supposed to represent? Wire news photos? This just looked bad...and cheap. Plus, the sound is terrible. Forget the mumbling and just turn on the captions. As for the sound overall and the sound FX, they were nowhere near as convincing as in "Heat." The weapons used in "Heat" sounded like actual weapons being fired on the streets of LA. The weapons in "Public Enemies" sound like canned sound FX bought on-line. You never once believe that a shotgun or Tommy gun is being fired.
Other than my complaints, not a bad movie. Depp does a pretty good job, as do Crudup and Bale. (Though they should have just given up and told Bale to drop the accent.) Everyone else is pretty forgettable.
Frankly, I prefer John Milius' 1973 version of the Dillinger story with Warren Oates. Check it out.