The modern, unwatchable, movie...

Rating: 1/10 (5 July 2009)

What a shame. Of all directors, Michael Mann, who has proved that he can make good films again and again, goes off the deep end. Maybe he feels he's getting old and wanted to prove he can use the hippest, grooviest new style just like the young people do.
Whatever his reasons, he has rendered an unwatchable movie, coalescing all the worst techniques into one long aggravating disaster. Shaky-cam, jerky-cam, bumpy-cam, jitter- cam. Long, lingering ultra-closeups obscuring high tension action sequences. Disgustingly self-indulgent directing in which Mann as much as says, yeah, there's a lot going on back there but I'm not showing it to you. I'm showing this part of a guy's face, and that's all you get to see.
The movie hardly tells any story at all. There are long, elaborate sequences of events that NEVER HAPPENED IN DILLINGER'S LIFE. Important characters in Dillinger's life go unnamed in the movie, events are shown and not explained so today's audience misses their significance. And so little story is told, that it's as if Mann thinks he's made a film for a new generation audience who don't care to know anything about the people and events, all they want is the barest thread leading from action sequence to action sequence.
And maybe he's right. This may be the wave of the future, unwatchable movies that don't tell a story about famous names from our past, names everybody recognizes but nobody remembers much about, so writers can be free to make up anything at all and not be tied down to actual events. Wonderful.
I spent about a third of this abomination with my eyes actually closed, trying to avoid a headache. Most of the rest was marginally viewable and deadly dull. I actually reviewed all the teams in the NFL for a while trying to think of the answer to a TV game show question, "Name two of the 5 NFL teams named for birds." The contestant got the Cardinals and the Eagles so the show didn't show the other 3. I got the Falcons and Seahawks right away, but not number 5. Two days later, during this movie, I took the time to review all the teams geographically starting in New England and going counterclockwise through the northern states, down the west coast, across to Florida and finally up the east coast to the Baltimore Ravens. That's almost the whole NFL, and it provided a nice vacation from the dreck on the screen.