Public Enemies

For those of us who are accustomed to seeing much better films from director Michael Mann, this one is going to be a disappointment.

This movie has some decent action scenes but nothing like the major shootout in Heat or the finale of Thief.

In fact, the screenwriter seems to have come up with a script which borrowed plenty of elements from Mann's earlier ( and superior) works and transposed the story to the 1930's and tried to fit the accounts of John Dillinger and Melvin Purvis into the story arc.

Historical inaccuracies, notwithstanding, that might have been entertaining except this movie is a complete mess.

There is no kind of build up to the finale like there was with Hanna and McCauley in Heat, Johnny Depps' Dillinger was depicted in a superficial manner unlike James Caan's safecracker in Thief, the shitty High Def format used to film the movie gave many of the scenes a cheap look and gave it the feel of a homemade movie shot on a camcorder and is , IMHO, totally inapropriate for a Period piece, the shootouts were competently choreographed but nothing spectacular like Mann's previous pictures and the exposition is so clumsily handled that the movie becomes confusing at times because it doesn't spend enough time providing even a semblance of a backstory from one act to the next.

Regardless of whether or not any of you will actually enjoy this mess of a film, I doubt any of you will think that this is destined to be a classic.