Public Enemies Review

Michael Mann handed the Depression to high definition video, and the result still splits rooms. Faces have pores, night exteriors have real depth, and the Little Bohemia shootout in the black woods looks and sounds like nothing else in the genre, muzzle flashes lighting pine trunks while Thompson guns crack instead of rattle.

The same cameras also make period costume look like rental stock, and several daylight scenes have the flatness of a local news broadcast. Johnny Depp underplays Dillinger as a man with no interior beyond the next room he walks into, which is at least a choice, and Marion Cotillard gives Billie Frechette the only warmth on offer, especially under interrogation.

Christian Bale's Melvin Purvis is the hole in the middle of it. The script hands him a flat Southern reserve, a bureau to run and almost nothing to want, so the chase has one live end and one dead one. Stephen Lang walks off with the last act as Charles Winstead by simply seeming like a man who has killed people before. The Biograph Theater sequence is patient and superb, yet the two hours preceding it never accumulate the pressure that ending is owed.