Public Enemies

Public Enemies; what a disappointment. I was wondering why the hype of this movie suddenly disappeared while it was still showing in cinemas, now I know why. As a Johnny Depp biopic, I had high hopes for this movie, as other Depp biopics I have seen are fantastic – Blow and Donnie Brasco. In Depp’s defence, his performance as the Depression-era bank-robber-with-a-heart John Dillinger was exceptional, as most Depp performances are, but an actor can only be as good as the screenwriter, director and producers who work on their storyline before shooting, and with their image after they have left the set, and in this case, that’s where things went wrong: somewhere in pre-production, and again in post-production.

Film makers of the new century have succeeded in telling ‘both sides of the story’ in that they have given both the good guys and bad guys that dualistic element which makes us all human, and from which audiences can connect with the characters. Whether it be a hero with a dark past, or a self-destructive addiction; or a villain who is perhaps misunderstood, or started out with good intentions and through circumstance has found themselves on the ‘bad-guy’ path. Either way, characters are no longer as two-dimensional as your clichéd ‘good guy’/’bad guy’ and that’s one of the best things about watching such movies, to try and justify and understand the motives and behaviours of these characters.

In Public Enemies, director Michael Mann has taken it one-too-many steps in a direction that’s not completely in the past, but definitely not one that should be trodden in the future. In the film, Mann’s Dillinger is clearly the bank robber we love to love. He is presented as the ultimate vigilante with no room for even questioning whether or not his actions are wrong, which according to the law and social standards, are clearly wrong. Here, Dillinger is completely celebrated to the point of martyrdom – he’s a two-dimensional good ‘bad guy’, which is just as uninteresting as a two-dimensional purely ‘good guy’. Meanwhile Christian Bale, an actor of whom I’m a fan, plays Melvin Purvis the J. Edgar Hoover-selected agent appointed to capture the movie’s ‘villain’. Bale’s Purvis comes off as no more than an annoying pest, with no real personal motive for capturing Dillinger. The banality of this character is tiresome, and one cannot find themselves sympathetic to his cause, despite his being the ‘good guy’.

All-in-all the movie seems to be a case of mistaken character identity on the part of the screenwriters and director. It could have been good had it delved deeper into the psyches of both men – not a completely new phenomenon in cinema-storytelling, but a direction which seemed to never even occur to the moviemakers. And while I will definitely watch another Johnny Depp and Christian Bale movie, I will never again watch another Michael Mann movie.