A Review of "Public Enemies"

Public Emenies was not the worst film I have ever seen. But it wasn't the best film I had ever seen either.

Part of the problem came in that it had no identity. It was trying to be too many things at one. It tried to be a gangster movie, it tried to be a crime-drama and it tried to be a romance, without successfully being any of these.

My biggest complaint about the movie, however, comes from my two main men themselves. I love Johnny Depp and Christian Bale and usually cannot stop gushing about the brilliance of their performances. As John Dillinger and Mervin Purvis, however, they both fell flat. Neither of them played their role with any sort of personality, so through the majority of the movie, I felt a little dead on the inside because I didn't know who I should feel sorry for or why.

I also didn't like the artitistic decision of Michael Mann to leave the majority of the film without a score. In a film where your two leads are playing without any discernable emotion, a score is needed to convey the emotion of the story so that the audience feels SOMETHING.

The best performances of the film came from Marion Cotilliard, and the rest of the supporting cast who I believed were their famous bank robbing counterparts and whom I felt something, whether sympathy or loathing depending on the case.

This is another year Johnny Depp will go Oscar-less. And that is your final word on Public Enemies.

NOTE: Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schawartzbaum and I actually agree about this movie-it's a sign of the apocalypse.