Michael Mann made HEAT and that one ruled. It was a movie about bank robbers and the cops trying to catch them that got really heavy about the personal lives of everyone involved. I have watched Heat so many times I couldn’t even count. It’s the bomb.
PUBLIC ENEMIES is a movie about bank robbers and the cops trying to catch them, directed by the same guy only this one takes place in 1933 during the Great Depression. There’s no reason that PUBLIC ENEMIES shouldn’t have been as good as HEAT. In fact, it could have been better than HEAT because with the whole American ‘economic downtown’ and the comparisons thrown around about now and The Great Depression, it could have been a really cool look into how these kinds of circumstances mold these kinds of people.
But we don’t get any of that. PUBLIC ENEMIES is plot for plot’s sake and that’s it. There are a couple of intense action scenes (none of them the bank robberies) but they’re strung together with soap opera bits of nothing. It’s fun to watch everyone playing dress up and having fun doing the period piece thing, but at no point does anyone give us any reason to care about anything anyone is doing. The characters are never fleshed out into people. I don’t know anything more about John Dillinger now than I did before the movie started. He’s an archetypal old-fashioned bank robber. And Christian Bale is the archetypal cop who’s after him. I’m a fan of 30s pop culture and gangster lore so it’s kind of fun to watch the action scenes and hear the names Frank Niti, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson thrown about but I didn’t even know which guy was supposed to be Baby Face Nelson until the last scene he’s in.
Oh, and Giovanni Ribisi is in it. He doesn’t do much and he’s kind of a throwaway but for some reason I always get a kick out of it whenever I see him. I think that started with BOILER ROOM. But we’re not talking about BOILER ROOM. We’re talking about PUBLIC ENEMIES.
The archetypal girl in this movie has nothing to do but fawn over John Dillinger. I get that women are attracted to confidence and power but beyond that we have nothing as to why she would go along with him, and we are given absolutely nothing about why John Dillinger is so interested in and devoted to her. He just seems to pick her out of the crowd and instantly go cuckoo obsessed with her and we don’t know anything about either of them.
The movie looks like it was shot by the cinematographer from Trailer Park Boys. I’m used enough to that digital look in movies but for a movie that takes place in 1933, it absolutely kills the illusion. You can see the make-up and it looks way different when the camera pans than if they had shot it on film. Maybe it was just the digital projection, I don’t know. Regardless, at no point was I able to lose myself in it. I was always conscious of the actors. It never feels like we’re looking at that era the way THE UNTOUCHABLES did.
MIAMI VICE went kind of the same way, giving us no characterization and just plot, shot digitally. But that was sort of the point. It was supposed to play like any random episode of the TV show. It doesn’t work here though, and the whole movie feels like something everyone made to screen test the costumes and see how the period details photograph. It doesn’t feel like a whole movie.
It says a lot about the talent involved that despite these flaws, it’s never boring. It’s fun to look at, especially if you like those 30s cars, clothes, hairstyles, etc. Definitely worth a watch but you can safely wait for the DVD or download it.
