..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Public Enemies
Directed by Michael Mann

Is Public Enemies (A) an astute exploration of the mind and soul of one of the century's most notorious bank robbers; (B) a Robin Hood tale about a legendary folk hero/outlaw; (C) a good/evil story about an outlaw and the law man who brings him to justice; or (D) None of the above?

While Michael Mann's take on the legendary outlaw bank robber John Dillinger is largely saved from its flaws by Johnny Depp, it's also lacking the soul and humanity that might have elevated it to the extraordinary. Depp has such a natural charm that we can't help but root for him as Dillinger, even as his jailbreaks and bank robberies take the lives of those who get in his way, and even though we know from historical record (conspiracy theories aside) how his life ended. What we don't get to know much (or care much) about is who Dillinger was as a person.

We glean bits and pieces of Dillinger's personality, at least as Mann sees him: he liked being famous, he was aware of his public image, and he was very protective of and loyal to those he considered his friends. He had moral lines in the sand with regard to his criminal enterprises; robbing banks was fine, robbing individuals or kidnapping was not. And all that's well and good, but a bit more about what made him tick, why certain moral issues were important to him while others were not, would have been quite interesting to explore; unfortunately, the film just doesn't go there.

Dillinger's gal Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, quite good at hitting the right balance of vulnerable/tough here) falls in love with Dillinger and is willing to sacrifice everything for him. Why? Yes, she's half-Indian and he doesn't care about that, but what about him motivates her to fall in love with a criminal? What about Dillinger inspires the loyalty and admiration of his gang, besides his daring and his dashing good looks? Mann doesn't seem to want to delve much beneath the surface, and where he does go isn't quite deep enough to be truly compelling.

Even more problematic, though, was Christian Bale as FBI Agent Melvin Purvis, who's charged by fledgling FBI director Herbert Hoover to take Dillinger down at all costs. Bale's performance felt oddly stilted to me, though I think this is more the fault of the script than Bale's acting skills. While he certainly played the role with heaps of moral certainty regarding his own actions, as a character he, like Dillinger, lacked any depth or humanity that would have made me feel invested in whether he succeeds in his quest to take Dillinger down or whether Dillinger gets the better of him. Bale's intense, often glowering, but the passion and the reasons for why he is who he is just aren't there; he might as well have been formed out of clay by Herbert Hoover out of one of his own ribs, for all that he has any sense of unique personhood about him.

Any movie whose set-up is based on good guys going after bad guys, whether it's a western, a gangster film or a mob flick, needs to make us care about one side, the other -- or preferably both. It's not just about what happens, it's about how and why it happens, and too often in this film the how and why are neglected in favor of nicely executed car chases, gorgeous shots and machine gun fire.

In the Godfather films, LA Confidential, Goodfellas, even Mann's own Heat, there are essentially bad, amoral characters, but they were fully fleshed, interesting and conflicted amoral characters that we knew enough about to at least understand some of what made them tick, even if we didn't agree with their actions. In John Hillcoat's The Proposition, we learn enough about Danny Huston's character and his relationships with his odd, criminal family that even though he was a raping, pillaging, murdering sociopath, we could still feel some empathy at the end as he sat dying from a fatal belly wound delivered by the hand of his own brother, who holds him up until the end.

There was an emotional depth to all those films that allowed us to feel drawn and engaged as an audience into the story of these characters; although it's still a solid, mostly enjoyable ride with some great production design and solid acting, this is the kind of depth that Public Enemies lacks, and I'm sorry to say it because I like Mann as a director and I like this cast.

But why cast character actors like Bale and especially Depp and then neglect to give them more to work with? This isn't a PBS special on bank robbers of the Depression or a documentary about the founding of the FBI and Hoover's obsession with "public enemies," it's a character drama; unfortunately, the "character" part is anemic, and that keeps the film overall from being fascinating or compelling, other than for the visceral pleasure of watching Depp do anything on screen.

We never see beyond Depp's charismatic surface into what might have made Dillinger the man he was, other than what feels like some hastily scripted (and equally hastily delivered) dialogue between Dillinger and Billie Frechette that feels like the rat-a-tat patter of machine gun fire: My mom died when I was three. Dad beat the crap out of me. What more do you need to know, babe?

Well, a lot more would have been good, actually; by apparently trying to stick as close as possible to historial fact, Mann and his fellow writers miss the opportunity to explore the myth that would have better humanized Dillinger and made this story about him more interesting. It's a shame, really. Public Enemies isn't a bad film, and it's mostly entertaining, but there was the possibility of a really great film in there somewhere. Unfortunately, this isn't it.

-by Kim Voynar

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