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Sorry, V, I've got to disagree..
Public Enemies (2009)
A failed character study, a failed romantic drama, a failed historical bio-pic- all that comes through in Mann's latest movie is his plentiful digital gunfire, and even that gets old quickly. There was so much potential in a film about John Dillinger, but the script is horrendously derivitive; it ignores its time period (this was the depression- did anyone notice?) as well as its characters and is more concerned with meaningless quibble and false sentimentality. Johnny Depp is adequate, I suppose, for the material he was given, but I felt nothing for his character; in a scene toward the end of the film he finds identification with the gangsters of the silver screen, but there was no double revelation involving me. Bale was an entirely seperate disaster on his own; he recklessly blends about four different accents and two kinds of speech inpediments, and his face retains the emotional resonance of cardboard. A film about John Dillinger should be full of life, moral ambiguity, depthful characters; aside from a few well-directed action sequences, this film was left cold and uncared for by a director who should have known better.
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