CityLife

Public Enemies

THE signs were all good for Michael Mann’s John Dillinger film.

When could there be a better time for a film about a Great Depression gangster anti-hero who simply robbed banks, as opposed to the bankers robbing us? 

And Johnny Depp is invariably good value, especially when he’s given a less-than-straightforward character to work with. 

Throw in an Oscar-winning lead actress, the redoubtable Marion Cotillard, and add Michael Mann as a director and what could go wrong?

Well apparently, the final product could simply be a bit dull, as turns out to be the case here. 

Lost highway

Having started in the middle of the story – we’re given no background at all for Dillinger or, indeed, any of the other characters – the film just never catches fire, turning instead into a succession of bank robberies, jail breaks and driving out of town down that great American lost highway.

Dillinger (Johnny Depp) was an undoubtedly charismatic bank robber whose lightning raids made him the number one target of J Edgar Hoover’s fledgling FBI and its top agent, Melvin Purvis (Bale), as well as a folk hero to much of the downtrodden public. 

No jail could hold him, or so the story went. 

His charm and audacious jailbreaks endeared him to almost everyone, from his girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, the La Vie En Rose Oscar-winner), to an American public who had no sympathy for the banks that had plunged the country into the Depression. 

Public Enemy Number One

But while the adventures of Dillinger’s gang, which at one point included the sociopathic Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), thrilled many, Hoover (Billy Crudup) hit on the idea of exploiting the outlaw’s capture as a way to elevate his Bureau of Investigation into the national police force that became the FBI. 

He made Dillinger America’s first Public Enemy Number One and sent in Purvis, the dashing ‘Clark Gable of the FBI’, to get his man by any means necessary. 

Still, Dillinger and his gang consistently outwitted and outgunned Purvis’ men, so it was only after the likes of Chicago crime boss Frank Nitti turned on Dillinger, that the FBI able to close in on him.

People's friend

The film veers between fact and legend, sticking mostly with facts, but still leaves us wondering whether Dillinger was an amiable sociopath with an eye on his own newsclippings or a true anti-hero and people’s friend. 

As it turns out, he seeems to be just a guy who robs banks, and, if that’s all he ever was, why such a lavish production? 

It’s never less than entertaining but one can’t help feeling a little disappointed, given that Public Enemies had the potential to be so much more.
 

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