Looking at photos of John Dillinger, he looked every bit as smug as he was. He was a textbook definition of confidence, guts, and cajones. There was nothing John Dillinger was afraid of, and this man without fear helped to inspire the FBI and define the word gangster.
It was a time when people didn’t have money and banks did. He wasn’t so much a criminal as he was a folk hero. Though he missed the ‘give to the poor’ part, people still got a big kick out of him robbing from the rich.
Catching such a man was not an easy task. J. Edgar Hoover, then a younger man, was intent on changing the face of law enforcement. He would be integral in founding the FBI and the whole concept of cross-state federal crime. He was obsessed with bringing down criminals, and none more than public enemy #1 — John Dillinger.
Add to this a dogged FBI agent by the name of Melvin Purvis who was charged with bringing Dillinger down, and we have an intriguing story of cops and robbers in its truest sense. After eventually bringing Dillinger down, Melvin Purvis ended up committing suicide many years later. Such games are not for the weak.
With this sort of classic story filled with equal parts history and seeming fantasy, some of the best actors of our day, and a prime opening spot on the 4th of July, how could a filmmaker screw this up?
After seeing Public Enemies, that question can be answered. Michael Mann seems to have gotten so caught up in his period costumes that he forgot what was at the center of the real story — characters.
Johnny Depp does as well as can be expected, but we never really get to know John Dillinger. That could be excused if we instead got to know Melvin Purvis or J. Edgar Hoover, but those are also both untouchable, distant and hard to understand.
If not the characters, then at least the story of a depression era gangster as the last of a dying breed before the g-men came in and cleaned up America could have been utilized, but even that is distant and difficult to connect with.
For all of John Dillinger’s charm, Mann seems unable to give us a consistent vantage point from which to view the goings on. It is foolish to ignore the heart of your character when everyone knows how the movie is going to end.
Either Dillinger should have been played the martyr or the evil criminal, but instead we straddle the line between wanting to like him and knowing he doesn’t deserve to live. He’s clearly more upstanding than many of his criminal counterparts, but that’s not saying much.
Purvis, who managed to accomplish what seemed to be impossible, could have been painted as a pinnacle of American ingenuity. Crime-fighting was transforming. It was a time when the FBI realized that they couldn’t fight crime with guns — they had to use their heads.
We do get brief mentions of how Purvis masterfully used forensics and tracking to catch his prey — something near revolutionary at the time — but it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Purvis finally caught up with John Dillinger not by outgunning him, but by outsmarting him.
Overall, I give this movie credit for inspiring me to read more about John Dillinger, Melvin Purvis, and the formation of the FBI. I admire movies that can turn me into a history-reading nut for a few days.
But sadly, I probably would have gotten more out of an hour long documentary on the subject. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale are underused and deserve the attention that their iconic characters deserve.
This movie wants to be so very good. The set pieces are good, the movie takes you back to the 30s. But for all the beauty, Mann just couldn’t manage to bring the movie into focus.
Verdict: C+ Tilt: B