Public Enemies

Just finished watching "Public Enemies", starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, and must say that I am not the least bit impressed. This movie is so bad on so many levels. Dare I say it also shows on the production value for the DVD as there is no real bonus material whatsoever unless you leave out Michael Mann's movie commentary feature. Which, by the way, is the only way, to at least understand how this film got financed in the first place.

Who was John Dillinger? Who was Melvin Purvis? How did the Bureau of Investigation become the infamous Federal Bureau of Investigation? Don't expect any satisfying answers nor interpretations from this movie, though this is precisely what it should have been about. Story or character development-wise this movie is incredibly shallow. Good and/or believable acting is hard to find. It is more about how to totally screw the way of (mis-)using digital technology.

Michael Mann has a long history of having been falling in love with digital cameras and has failed on an epic scale this time around. I still can quite vividly remember his commentary on "Collateral" (2004) when he was expressing how digital cameras capture even small fractions of light in the background so greatly. The downside of this is the fact that lightning gets even more important as the cameras will capture everything exactly the way how it was lit. This also means that a few tricks in the (technical) book of movie-making do no longer work and it shows big time with this one. In the end, shooting digitally is somewhat cheaper, but it will look *real* cheap if you do not spend a lot of time at post-production and grading.

Some of the steady-camera work is ridiculous, I was more than once afraid the operator tripped, but then again, this is no documentary where they'd let something like this to stay in the final cut. Maybe I am too critical of the technical aspects of this movie, and lets face it the gun-flinging in the woods is by far the low-point of the whole movie, but, in the end, this movie is about a story that wants to unfold and never gets the chance to actually do. Sad, actually.

Overall the movie much felt like a TV-miniseries with better than average actors unable or hindered to show it, omitting all the annoying show reminder overlays and commercial break fade-outs. If I'd had to give it a rating: 3 out of 10.