Public embarrassment.

Rating: 3/10 (1 July 2009)

There is an efficient fluidity of failure in every facet of Public Enemies that astounds as it frantically uncoils with sloppy incomprehension and crass piousness over it's two and a half hours running time.
The John Dillinger film bio which gets recycled every 30 years (45 with Lawrence Tierney, 74 with Warren Oates) this time around has a bigger budget, bigger stars and slicker production values making the finished product with its wretched excess even more appalling. Heavy handed, master of bombast Michael Mann's (Heat, Miami Vice) bloated and ponderous style jerks rather than plods this time with cinematographer Dante Spinotti's jittery camera-work shot mostly in tight under lit close-up obliterating composition and setting throughout.
As Dillinger, Johnny Depp does a very impressive Elvis imitation; more lovestruck than ruthless, more thoughtful than reckless. It's an abomination. Depp may have more talent than the other Dillingers but Oates was edgier and Tierney probably would have been more at home as a member of the real gang than the Hollywood crowd he populated. Depp is too suave, noble and lovesick. Christian Bale is equally woeful as Melvin Purvis; emptily staring out from beneath a fedora most of the time, sounding like a subdued Tennessee Williams character when he does blurt something out. Marie Cotillard as main squeeze Billie looks glum throughout while Billy Crudup's mincing J. Edgar Hoover (closely and silently shadowed by agent/lover Charles Tolson) and Stephen Graham's manic Baby Face Nelson provide unintended comic relief.
Of course blow hard Mann's big and empty acts of self indulgence would not be complete without the self important cathedral music scores of Elliot Goldenthal. As he did most memorably in another hot air balloon Heat, Mann attempts to elevate his hardscrabble characters and situations to mythic proportions with grand flourishes of Goldenthal's vapid score. It fits like a cheap suit. This isn't knights of the round table, it's the Depression.
Amid all this ineptitude Mann manages to find time to be au courant (shades of Guantanamo) by shoehorning a police interrogation scene involving torture and it's ineffectiveness into the story. Typical of his clumsy and fatuous style he even takes it up a notch by having the craven inquisitor look like, you guessed it Dick Cheney. It makes one wonder if Mann needs a crane to lift his hands.
Public Enemies is a textbook example of arrogantly bad film-making. With it's slick and expensive look, star power and self importance it displays a blundering confidence, gutting history and making the fatal mistake to go Bonnie and Clyde (not to mention the beautifully realized doomed lover bank robber films They Drive by Night, Thieves Like Us and Gun Crazy) while ignoring the grittier more realistic possibilities on the life and death of the Twentieth Century's most infamous bank robber. It's a fatal mistake that makes Public Enemies DOA.