Putrid

Rating: 4/10 (24 January 2010)

Incredibly lousy gangster yarn. On a technical level, it's one of the worst releases I've ever seen. The film was shot on digital cameras that look like they were bought at Best Buy. It's murky and downright hideous to watch, dark as Hell with laughable, anachronistic hand-held camera work. The audio has a lot of problems, as well. That all might be tolerable if the movie was otherwise good, but it's far from it. Many critics have written that the film wants to de-mythologize the '30s gangster yarns. This film's idea of de-mythologizing John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) is to make him a complete bore. The actual story sets him up as a kind of tragic hero, so in no way does it actually try to "de-mythologize". It's all into the myth. The G-men are also de-glamorized, and likewise are completely boring. None of the actors bring much to the proceedings. Depp and Marion Cotillard are extremely boring as the central couple. None of the other gangsters pop out at you. If you gave me a line-up with all the gangster characters in the film, I couldn't tell you who the Hell was playing, say, Baby Face Nelson. It's pretty bad when Christian Bale gives the only halfway decent performance in your film. He brings the same methody crap to this one as he does to every movie, and is as bad as ever. But at least his character has a little bit of life to him, unlike everybody else in the movie. This was an absolute disaster. I'm not a big Mann fan, but he's made a few good to great movies. This is by far the worst he's ever put his name on.