FILM
Public Enemies (15)
3/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Johnny Depp as bank robber John Dillinger attempts to evade G-Man Melvin Purvis in Michael Mann's Depression era crime chase thriller.
REVIEW
You're there. Right there. You should see Johnny Depp's hands. They're like normal hands with pits and divots and veins and quick-bitten fingernails.
And the rat-a-tat-tat of the gunfire surrounds you. Actually, it's more of a pop-pop-pop only you expect the rat-a-tat-tat because you've seen a ton of Depression-era gangster movies. But, like I said, it's a pop-pop-pop because director Michael Mann did the research. He always does the research. Either way, it's right there, like they're shooting from the popcorn stand.
And Marion Cotillard has a mole on her forehead and it's in the dead centre, geometrically precise, like a stunted unicorn horn or a left-over motion-capture marker glued on too hard. Normally, on celluloid, the mole would be in the background, biding its time, doing a sudoku till the director called a wrap.
But, here, in this new-fangled ultra high resolution digital filming that Michael Mann's deployed on Public Enemies, the mole... the mole's right there. Mugging the scene, doing a kind of mole equivalent of the soft-shoe shuffle, humming The Tree Of Life and trying to attract the attention of a talent scout.
It's weird. More than that, it's distracting. Because something's not right. The colours are flat and/or coated in nicotine, fast action leaves a residue blur on the screen and in there somewhere there's a movie about real-life villain John Dillinger and his toe-to-toe with clean-cut G-Man Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) but I'm having trouble hacking through a ribcage of innovations to find a heart.
So all that's weird. Then there's the sound, which is like what your Gran would produce if she were asked to capture the family pulling crackers on Christmas day and she couldn't quite master the controls on the Sony handycam because her arthritis was playing up. All soft and mumbly and what-did-he-just-say one minute and SUDDENLY BLARING FOR NO APPARENT reason the next.
So that's two things that are distracting you (meanwhile, there's man two seats in front who's negotiating a fiddly redundancy settlement via Twitter on his BlackBerry and keeps having to leave the auditorium to thrash out another sub-clause 140 characters at a time. I hate him. I hope he gets nothing except hardened arteries. I hate him).
Thirdly, there's Johnny Depp who's... well, who is he? He's given the most devilish, swarve, eyebrow-cocked, trim moustachio'd things to say ("I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars... and you," he says to secure Cotillard's Billie Frechette and she dutifully swoons).
But this is like Jack Sparrow checked into the Oregon Asylum under the name Randle McMurphy and now, one lobo later, he's some Botox-ed drone reciting some words he half-remembers from an old Clark Gable film while shovelling down spoonfuls of Honey Nut Cheerios.
You can see what Mann's trying to do - get in there, among the action, shoulder to shoulder with the hoods and cops, on board the sweeping side platforms of a Ford Model A, a-pop-pop-popping with their Tommy Guns, skimming the brims of their fedoras, turning gunsmoke into frantic spirals and generally looking like a Next catalogue from the '80s.
So you try to get past the distractions and... oops off he goes again with his BlackBerry to secure usage of the company BMW 5-Series during his notice period... and appreciate this good, brave, solid piece of work.
Mann dawdles a little too much on the inbetween bits and the secondary characters never hang around long enough to have a whole subplot each but you give the Miami Vice helmer a setpiece shoot-out and your pulse is racing, time stand stills and you're rooting for the PR savvy gangster who took money from the bad old banks but told the flat-capped proles to put away their hard-earned. Pop, pop and, indeed, pop.
Don't tell Mr Mann, but the story is a lift from his masterwork Heat. Cops and robbers, opposite sides of the same coin, on a fatal collision course. And that Marion mole? That's maybe her third eye because the Oscar-winning Gallic beauty sees terrible things round the corner for her beau although he's just living for today and there's one last job he's gotta do before the Brazilian sunset beckons.
It doesn't end well. For all concerned. And you get the feeling that Mann and Depp and Bale and Cotillard sauntered toward the golden horizon after the last shot, pondered their contribution to the evolution of ultra-high resolution digital era, shrugged their shoulders and went "Meh".
Like us, in fact, only in hats.
– First appeared on wharf.co.uk on July 12
