Overlong and ultimately disappointing.

Rating: 6/10 (4 July 2009)

I'll spare you any suspense, here. Simply put, Public Enemies is a major disappointment. There is one aspect that the film has going for it, though, and that is the performances. Johnny Depp is great but, as I've read in other reviews, not exactly irreplaceable. Marion Cotillard is fantastic, but underused. Christian Bale is solid, but pretty forgettable. Unfortunately, everything else about the film proved disappointing.
This is the story of John Dillinger, who robbed banks, broke out of prisons, shot a lot of guns, loved a woman he met and didn't spend much time with, and...not much else. At least, that's what Public Enemies would have you believe. So little actually happens in this film it's a marvel they managed to stretch the running time past an hour and a bit.
A short run through: John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) escapes from a prison. Then he robs a bank. Then he meets Billie (Marion Cotillard), and they fall in love. He robs another bank. Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) wants to catch him. Shootout. Bank robbery. Repeat. He gets shot. How long did that take me, 30 seconds? I'm not saying the film was unnecessary, it was just unnecessarily long. So many scenes could have been cut down or just taken away altogether. The shootout near the middle of the film took so long to get through, that about halfway through it I had completely forgotten what it was they were doing. From that point on, it was nothing but bullets, blood, yelling and a lot of flashes from the guns that nearly blinded me.
The film wasn't exactly a treat for the eyes, either. The look of the film was horribly uneven, split evenly three ways between beautiful, crystal clear shots, amateur student film hand-held, and security camera footage. Either one wouldn't have been awful on its own, but it was just so wildly inconsistent that a good chunk of the time I was too distracted, wondering what had happened to the camera (sometimes between shots in the same scene), to worry about the story.
And like I said above, there's not much story to tell here. I'm sure the man had a very interesting life, but there was no real point to the film. It didn't seem like there was any specific story to tell. Quite simply put, it was merely about John Dillinger. "Well, just what about John Dillinger?", you ask. And I don't have an answer for you. Sorry. Either way, the film didn't highlight Dillinger as a hero or as a villain, and while I don't mind the impartial nature of the film in itself, I had a hard time really caring about what happened to him.
The love story was easily the most entertaining part of the film. Too bad it didn't show up much. My favorite parts of the film involved Marion Cotillard, and they didn't last long. What a shame. If they had cut down the major shootout or cut out one or two of the bank robbery scenes that were mostly all the same, they could have focused more on that story and I wouldn't have minded the runtime as much.
So, aside from the good performances from just about everyone involved, there's not much to get excited about here. It was overlong, pretty low on plot, and filled to the brim with unnecessary scenes that had left my mind before I had even left the theater. Such a disappointment. It could have been something great, and it just...wasn't.
6/10