Re: Public Enemies - Grading and Discussion (Johnny Depp, Christian Ba
^Now that I've seen it, I think that analysis is right on the money.
Public Enemies is a good movie. A really good movie, in fact. But, like Ebert, I thought it lacked that little extra something that would have made it a great movie.
In my case, I think that little extra something was characterization. Dillinger is probably the only fully-realized character in the film. And that's very unfortunate, because Mann drops all sorts of intriguing hints about his law-enforcement characters.
The impression I got was that Purvis was out of his depth in the manhunt for Dillinger--that he had been promoted too quickly by the power- and headline-hungry Hoover. He made poor decisions, under pressure, and then acted recklessly, trying to compensate for those poor decisions--and in the process, he came into conflict with one of his subordinates, Agent Winstead. This, the movie seemed to hint, made Purvis almost as much a 'public enemy' as Dillinger.
But, frustratingly, the law-enforcement side of the story wasn't fully developed, and all we got were hints. Bale was as watchable as ever, but his Purvis remained something of a cipher, compared to Depp's Dillinger.
On the positive side--this was a very well-made and authentic-seeming historical crime drama. The gunfights were particularly well-staged, and as with Heat I was particularly impressed by the sound of what was happening. The acting was quite good, as was the direction and pacing: it seemed a lot shorter than 2 hours and 20 minutes.
But without a fully-developed antagonist for Dillinger in the form of Purvis, the film couldn't quite reach the heights of Heat or Collateral. So it wound up being just "above average" instead of "excellent," in my opinion.