First things first: Michael Mann’s much-discussed decision to shoot his latest effort on digital video is, at best, highly questionable. Public Enemies — based on Bryan Burrough’s book about the modernization of the FBI in response to the headline-grabbing crime sprees of John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson et al. — is set in 1933, and the murky textures of Dante Spinotti’s cinematography seem wholly out of place.
One argument in its favour could be that shooting this material in such a palpably present-tense manner alleviates the period-piece fetishization of a movie like The Untouchables. True enough, yet Mann gives us dramatic and thematic clichés in lieu of visual ones. Find here the umpteenth iteration of the tired killer-as-American-superstar trope, with Johnny Depp’s cool cucumber Dillinger looking sympathetic by association as he stays one heist ahead of square G-man Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale).
Mann greases the wheels of audience empathy by showing Dillinger refusing to take customers’ money during bank robberies but, for the most part, the director evacuates any sort of point of view on the material: we’re a long way from the nuanced ambivalence of Heat (just as Marion Cotillard is even twerpier than Amy Brenneman in a thankless love-interest role). A subplot about the Tommy-gun crowd getting edged out of crime syndicates by newly corporatized rivals is perfunctory, while a late stab at meta-movie territory — with Dillinger experiencing a wry moment of self-recognition in the Biograph Theater — just feels desperate. Mann has made gunplay films both good (Heat) and intriguingly flawed (Miami Vice) but never one so oddly half-cocked.