It would seem like a match made in heaven: director Michael Mann, whose Heat is a modern classic of crime movies, and John Dillinger, arguably America's most famous criminal, the first to be dubbed Public Enemy Number One, and a folk hero to the victims of the Great Depression.
Throw in Johnny Depp, whose showmanship one would imagine well suited to a gangster who liked to play to the crowd, and a fine film is in prospect. And yet Public Enemies fails to achieve the epic status it so clearly craves.
On the surface it works well enough. Some of Mann's image-making is marvellous (the combination of high-definition digital quality with fluid, often handheld, camera work makes this period tale seem surprisingly immediate), while no-one orchestrates a shoot-out like he does - the director has a ball as Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Co take on the Feds. But for all the loving period recreation and well-orchestrated set pieces - for all the thrill of men in hats blazing away with their machine guns while riding the running boards of their automobiles - the film is strangely unmoving.
The early 1930s was one of the most volatile periods in America's crime history, when notorious gangs roamed the poverty-stricken nation, robbing banks and trains, kidnapping and murdering. This was when J Edgar Hoover formed the FBI, whose special agents had powers to pursue criminals inter-state, the first of whom included Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and Baby Face Nelson.
While all these villains captured the public imagination, it was Dillinger - with his ingenious robberies and prison escapes, and his habit of handing cash back to customers during a robbery - who won their affection.
Mann starts his story at the beginning of the myth-making, as Dillinger emerges from a lengthy jail term, determined to revenge himself on society. Embarking with his gang on a robbing spree, he quickly comes to the attention of Hoover, who selects an impressive young agent, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), to hunt Dillinger down. Hereon the film is constructed as a cat and mouse: and though Dillinger is at first too smart for his adversary, the odds swing in Purvis's favour as the FBI's tactics become both more sophisticated and more brutal.
Ultimately, the film is no more than this chase, a succession of captures and escapes and near-misses. There is action aplenty, but little depth. Billy Crudrup is chilling as Hoover, pasty faced and neo-fascist, yet we see far too little of him. Bale is perfectly cast as the determined and humourless Purvis, yet we learn nothing of his private life, his ambitions or fears, and so the character never leaves first base.
Although there are many moments referring to Dillinger's notoriety (including an amusing scene in a cinema, when a news item on screen urges the audience to look left and right in case the gangster is among them, Dillinger studiously staring straight ahead), there's too little attention paid to the development of his relationship with working people, who loathed the banks that he emptied. Asked why he cares about ordinary citizens, he explains: "I hide out among em. I've got to care what they think." But such lines are too few and too throwaway.
Because Mann doesn't invest enough time in the social context of his story or the psychologies at play, his film falls ways short of its potential. He certainly fails (though in one scene he's blatantly trying) to replicate, with Depp and Bale, the memorable showdown in Heat between Pacino and De Niro. While Heat was an existential masterpiece, emotionally and psychologically Public Enemies fires blanks.
My feeling is that Mann has misplaced the heart of the story in the romance between Dillinger and hat-check girl Billie Frechette. Depp and French actress Marion Cotillard give this their all - and a scene in which Cotillard faces up to a beating to protect her man is magnifique; but it's the wrong track.
As for Depp, he is never as interesting playing clean-cut, matinee heroes (and this villain is definitely the hero of the piece) as he is eccentrics or extremists, whether it be Jack Sparrow or Sweeney Todd. It's as if admitting to his good looks drains him. Though one would imagine he'd have the dazzle for Dillinger, he looks, for the most part, subdued.
I can't help thinking of The Untouchables, Brian De Palma's account of Eliot Ness's battle with Al Capone, set a few years before Public Enemies. Less realistic in style, less self-consciously serious, De Palma's film nevertheless captured both the mythic and the human qualities in his battle between right and wrong.
One wanted to watch The Untouchables time and again. Public Enemies doesn't have the same glue.
***
OTHER FILMS
Ice Age 3 (U) Director: Carlos Saldanha
North by Northwest (PG) Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Reviewed by Demetrios Matheou
Why is it that most live action sequels succumb to the law of diminishing returns (Johnny Depp's own Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise being a recent example), yet animators see each new follow-up as an opportunity to up the ante, not only on their computer wizardry, but their scripts too.
Just as Ice Age 2: The Meltdown was more fun than the already enjoyable Ice Age, and added important characters to its central trio of prehistoric heroes - Manny the mammoth, Diego the sabre-tooth tiger and Sid the sloth - so Ice Age 3: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs is another step forward: having the good sense to put a consummate cameo artist - the silent squirrel in perpetual pursuit of a nut - closer to centre stage, while adding another scene-stealer and pitting our heroes against a new set of diabolical beasties.
OK, even the kids will know that mammoths came long after the dinosaurs. But the plot smartly justifies itself. When Sid inadvertently discovers some eggs and becomes the willing parent of three baby T-Rexes, their real mom stomps into town and takes him away with the brood. Manny and the others give chase, discovering a lost world under the ice.
The family theme, de rigueur in US movies (Manny and Ellie are expecting a child, which makes the soppy Sid broody in the first place) is its least interesting aspect. The wit and invention lie in the deadpan rapport between the friends, and in the supporting characters.
This time around the nameless squirrel - a throwback to Loony Tunes stalwarts such as Wile E Coyote - finds himself a female adversary, the pair caught between courting and competing for that elusive acorn. And then there's Buck, a toothless weasel with an eye patch, who lives in dino-land and has developed a Captain Ahab-like duel with its biggest monster. As voiced, with a cockney accent, by our own Simon Pegg, Buck is brilliantly, barkingly mad, and the flashback sequence when we learn how he lost his eye, pure genius.
North By Northwest is possibly Alfred Hitchcock's most purely entertaining film, a romantic thriller peppered with memorable set pieces, in which Cary Grant personifies the ordinary man turned reluctant hero. This 50th anniversary re-release is a great opportunity to see it on the big screen.
Grant plays Roger O Thornhill, New York ad man, middle-aged mother's boy and professional bachelor (the "O", he causally tells us, "is for nothing"), who becomes the victim of a profound case of mistaken identity, and has to go on the run from the police, a gang of criminals and, in a way, himself.
Thus begins a cross-country chase, involving en route the classic seduction on a train (and masterclass in non-contact kissing) with the beautiful Eva Marie Saint, the thrilling chase by crop duster, and the climactic decent down Mount Rushmore. And with cinema's most elegant bad guy, James Mason, purring malignly all the way. Marvellous.
