A big disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (28 June 2009)

I saw Public Enemies at a preview the other day. I am sorry to say I was quite disappointed with the movie. Being old enough to remember those days (and a movie buff, I might add), when I saw the trailers on P/E, I couldn't wait to see it. One of the best actors, Johnny Depp, was starring in it. Some of my disappointment was in the way Mann filmed it. Very much of it was filmed in tight close-up. This denied us seeing groups of characters conversing, switching to close-up for each bit of dialogue. Much of the movie was filmed in darkness, so in some scenes all we saw were flashes of gunfire. Agent Purvis (Christian Bale) had the worst South Carolinian accent I've ever heard - and must have realized it himself when later in the movie he abandoned it all together. The movie did very little to establish character identification. It took quite awhile to find out who Pretty Boy Floyd was or who Baby Face Nelson was. I thought the continuity of the movie was terrible. Heck, the movies of the 30s and 40s did better jobs of characterizing gangsters of that era. The one thing I did like was the actual showing of the Biograph theater. It brought back memories of a day long, long ago, when I went to the Biograph during a visit to Chicago.