Public Enemies Is A Snooze
Posted on Jul 02, 2009 @ 05:27PM - Add a comment
It’s not a good sign when the guy in the row in front of you is dead asleep throughout the entire movie. But the boredom that is Public Enemies is not star Johnny Depp’s fault. He’s as charismatic and as handsome as ever playing 30s era gangster/bank robber John Dillinger.
One problem is the uninspiring supporting cast, which includes the increasingly grating Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis and Billy Crudup, who is totally miscast as J. Edgar Hoover and adopts a weird James-Cagney like cadence while everyone else talks normally. All the other characters, lots of guys in fedoras, look so much alike, you have no idea who’s who.
And you kind of don’t care. The script, directed by Michael Mann, fudges history and has little depth. Besides a written statement at the beginning, which explains that John Dillinger started robbing banks during the Great Depression, we really have no idea what motivated him to turn to a life of crime or how he became so powerful and violent.
