Public Enemies

Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is meek, directionless and out of touch with its period, its characters and its audience, and yet it’s hardly the worst thing to grace theaters this summer. As massive a misfire as this Johnny Depp vehicle is, it is still at its worst the work of accomplished cinephiles slacking off.

I imagine it’s hard for a director such as Mann, working in territory so similar in theme and character to his masterpiece Heat. You either risk critique by repeating yourself, adhering to the same successful formula that elevated you before, or you can distance yourself from that formula as much as possible and hope for the best. Mann chose to do the latter here, and it hasn’t worked out as you’d hope.

Heat, if you recall, was a cat and mouse approach to crime that pitted Robert DeNiro’s smooth criminal against Al Pacino’s hard-nosed, all business crime stopper. There was a criminal team of friends, and a girl for whom DeNiro would risk it all. Public Enemies offers up the same game pieces, with Depp as smooth criminal John Dillinger, Christian Bale as hardnosed G-Man Melvin Purvis, a strong group of character actors as the team, and Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard (she of “this really is a city of angels!” acceptance speech fame) as the French beauty Dillinger would risk it all for.

What’s missing, however, in a striking and unforgiveable way, is the character insight and depth that made Heat so commandingly engaging. Back then, we spent hours with both DeNiro and Pacino, digging into their souls, discovering what made them tick, which, as it turned out, was essentially the same thing. Back then, Mann didn’t need to pick a side, a perspective – he found a loophole in the bond these two opposites shared at the center of it all.

You’ll find no such insight here, no choices, no discoveries. Instead, Mann does the opposite, distancing us from both men, never allowing or forcing us to choose a side or giving us anything to lay claim to. Public Enemies is a 140 minute history book, complete with vague interpretations and one-dimensional pictures.

And yet, remarkably, it spends little to no time on the actual history of the period in which this story takes place. Dillinger and his men ran wild during The Great Depression, a time that would seem to run extraordinarily parallel to our own, and yet apart from the rare one-off scene of poverty and despair, we get only fancy cars, fur coats and spiffy hair. To contrast this lifestyle with its immediate surroundings would have been interesting, and timely. But Mann looks to make no such point here.

Instead he focuses on the gunfights, creative camera work and closeups (of which there are many) and inspired Dillinger moments of ballsy genius (of which there are a few). For the most part it isn’t bad – the actors float through, but look good doing it. The writing is lazy, but it can also be fun. And the period work – what we see of it – looks great.

Unfortunately it all leads up to an ending that, while historically accurate, leaves us cold and unfulfilled. And that about sums up the film as a whole – it knows the facts and sticks to them well, but loses track of the story in the process, and thus ends up being very average and middle of the road. Dillinger would not be proud.

Updated Summer Blockbuster Smackdown Standings:
1. Star Trek
2. The Hangover
3. Up
4. Drag Me To Hell
5. Public Enemies
6. The Taking of Pelham 123
7. Terminator Salvation
8. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
9. Angels & Demons
10. X-Men Origins: Wolverine