PUBLIC ENEMIES

Considering how huge a movie star Johnny Depp is it’s surprising how few films of his I have seen, but that’s what comes of steering clear of both the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ franchise and the films of Tim Burton.

This 2009 film by Michael Mann is a rare example of Depp playing the role of a conventional leading man, that of the 1930s gangster John Dillinger.

It’s not an obvious fit for Depp’s talents so it is to his credit that I found him credible, although  I was a little doubtful that Dillinger was as sartorially elegant as he is shown here - for example, did he really wear tinted glasses to a movie theatre on the evening he was shot dead? 

The answer apparently is ‘yes’. 

And it was also the case that on that fateful evening the film he watched was indeed a gangster movie ‘Manhattan Melodrama’ in which we see Clark Gable utter the words “Die the way you live: all of a sudden. Living any other way doesn’t mean a thing”, words which seem rather too on the nose under the circumstances.

Mann does a decent job of ratcheting up the tension in the final scenes in and around the theatre, but overall the film is not a compelling drama.

It says something that the most emotionally involving scene is one where Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette is being beaten up by an overzealous FBI agent, and has to be rescued by Agent Purvis.

Purvis is in charge of the operation to bring down Dillinger and is played by Christian Bale. The screenplay doesn’t give him much to work with, and the relationship between him and Dillinger is not much to speak of, so one must resist the temptation to frame this film as a 1930s version of ‘Heat’.

Frechette is played very convincingly by Marion Cotillard, and her relationship with Dillinger provides some welcome relief from the somewhat routine gangster violence, of which I am not a big fan.

That being said I appreciated Stephen Graham’s effective contributions as a brutal Baby Face Nelson.

This was Mann's first all-digital film and I struggled with the look of it.  On the other hand I had no problem with the excellent score by Elliot Goldenthal which succeeds in imbuing the film with a sense of grandeur which it scarcely earns.

RATING: x Curb Your Enthusiasm