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That film grossed less than half of its gargantuan $135 million production budget domestically, and was not particularly well received by critics. Michael Mann is looking to bounce back from 2006’s Miami Vice remake. Several scenes were shot in entirely accurate locations, including the use of the Little Bohemia Lodge in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin (the site of a gunfight between Dillinger and the FBI,) and the alley outside of Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where Dillinger was shot and killed. The film’s script, adapted from the painstaking book by Bryan Burrough, has been touted as one of the most accurate portrayals of the time period and the war between feds and gangsters. Edgar Hoover as well as the grit of agents like Purvis led to many of the key mafia figures of the time – the titular Public Enemies – finally winding up in jail, at least temporarily, or dead, permanently.
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The power and influence of Dillinger and cronies like Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson was nearly unmatched in the early 1930s, and the young and somewhat disorganized Federal Bureau of Investigation was outmatched in trying to keep them in check. That’s probably all you need to know, but I’ll go on. Stephen Lang is great as one of the lawmen.Īdapted from an exhaustive nonfiction account of the wars between the fledgling FBI and the all-powerful gangsters of the 1930s, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies pits Johnny Depp as John Dillinger against Christian Bale’s FBI Agent Melvin Purvis.
![public enemies cast public enemies cast](https://static.cinemagia.ro/img/db/movie/02/90/72/public-enemies-916565l.jpg)
Incredibly boring.ĭecent, but ultimately forgettable in the shadow of Heat. Note to Michael Mann: you don't have to have a close-up of *every* character in *every* scene. The new film is based on Bryan Burrough's book "Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34," but it is about only Dillinger, making one wonder if another script exists somewhere - one written, perhaps, before Johnny Depp agreed to play Dillinger.Bloody (yet curiously bloodless) biopic doesn't hit on all cylinders Elliot Goldenthal's original score is little more than a background hum. Ballads of the era, particularly the repetitive "Bye, Bye Blackbird," are performed as funeral dirges - suggesting that no one in the '30s had any fun.
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Part of the insomnia-curing quietness is due to a misfire in the use of music. The shootout at Little Bohemia Lodge, where Dillinger and his gang hide out in Wisconsin, is a highlight, but photographed in digital video it's all dark and very difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys. The action scenes seem like something out of a high school play - toy guns and no real menace, even if Mann does resort to slow-motion bullets that splatter blood in the famous style of Sam Peckinpah. He robs banks as if he were performing a ballet - jumping over counters and treating his hostages as if they were his guests. Mann gives us, instead, close-ups of Johnny Depp - pondering.ĭepp plays the gangster cocky and cool - and distant. With just a few close-ups of country folk, Arthur Penn in "Bonnie and Clyde" showed us why common people not only sympathized with the criminals but set them up as heroic urban legends. Centering superficially on Dillinger's apparent obsession to rob banks, it tells us nothing of the starvation, lack of employment, and hatred of crooked institutions such as banks.