Soulless

Rating: 6/10 (27 May 2012)

Even Miami Vice had something that inspired me to revisit it, even if that revisit only confirmed my suspicions. Nonetheless, it offered a sense of greatness missed, in a lesser variation on the way that Heaven's Gate does. Public Enemies offers none of this. It's not a disaster. It is exactly what it seems to be, and that's its problem. Subtext, never a big part of a Michael Mann movie, is MIA here. The other problem is the choice of medium. This is the first film I've seen which has made me question the use of digital photography. Here it grates. It's a modern medium. Here, in a movie steeped in the 1930s, it throws you out of the moment, time after time. There are good performances, the cinematography's appropriate, the script's adequate but the whole fails to achieve anything beyond the sum of its parts. Blah.