REVIEW: ‘Public Enemies’

By saying that Michael Mann is wearing out his welcome with me as a director, I’m almost invalidating my “child of the Eighties” ID card.

Mann, who directs and co-wrote the Johnny Depp / Christian Bale period piece “Public Enemies,” holds two very distinct pieces of my filmgoing heart. The second-biggest piece is the bank robbery scene in “Heat,” which I will gladly hold up as one of the best action sequences in the last thirty years of film.

The biggest piece belongs to “Miami Vice,” the “MTV cops” show he created and rode herd over for five seasons. I was directly in “Miami Vice’s” wheelhouse – a teenager when the show debuted, I wanted to be Sonny Crockett, plain and simple, all the way down to my white cotton shell jacket and the dock shoes with no socks. Mann’s stylistic choices in “Miami Vice” were fresh and new for television, and heralded a new way to tell “cops and robbers” stories.

Because of “Vice,” I’ve had blinders on for his bigger blunders. “Manhunter” seemed great when I watched it, but seeing it now makes me cringe heavily. Mann’s return to the realm of “Miami Vice” was a heavy-handed muddled mess.

When I saw that Mann was directing “Public Enemies,” the story of Depression-era bank robber – turned – folk hero John Dillinger, I held out hope that he would have to jettison some of the most annoying Mann-isms, but they’re all on display:

The mix of digital and film-stock cinematography. With “The Insider” and “Collateral,” Mann’s use of digital cameras was edgy, and it served well to keep the audience off-balance. With his reboot of “Miami Vice” or his otherwise-masterful “Ali,” it just made the movie seem cheap – not easy to do with Colin Farrell or Will Smith. One would think that doing a film set in 1933, a director would want to keep anything viewers would consider “modern” out of the mix. Not so with Mann. The use of digital is especially jarring in “Public Enemies,” and the audience loses the illusion of being taken back seventy-five years.

The odd, out-of-place score choices. If you’re going to score a film using period music, such as ’30s-era jazz like “Bye Bye Blackbird,” great. If you’re going to utilize standard cinema scoring, good on you. If you’re going to make a stylistic call and employ electric blues slide guitar riffs… that’s quirky, but I can dig it. But, for the love of John Williams, never use all three in a mish-mash of styles… like Michael Mann.

The poor direction choices during pivotal action sequences. It’s easy to point to directors like Michael Bay and say that “a bigger explosion doesn’t make a better-staged sequence.” Mann’s supposed to know better (see the above comment on “Heat”). While it’s not Bay-tastic explosive mayhem, virtually every gunfight sequence between Johnny Depp’s band of bank robbers and Christian Bale’s G-Men is a jumbled, incoherent blob.

Confusing the hell out of your audience for the first 10 minutes. Not only does Mann drop the audience right into the middle of Dillinger’s crime spree, he does so with no exposition, and low-volume dialogue that’s swallowed up by the score (in the open, it’s the slide blues guitar, for those keeping score).

There’s a lot to like about “Public Enemies.” Johnny Depp turns in another phenomenal performance as Dillinger, a nihilist who’s grown so confident in his abilities as a Depression Era Robin Hood that he’s blindsided by his cohorts’ foibles. Christian Bale doesn’t have nearly as much to do as FBI Special Agent Melvin Purvis, but Bale makes the most of the time he’s given. While the story centers around Purvis’ pursuit of Dillinger, it’s almost secondary to watching Dillinger’s cult of personality take hold. Anyone in his orbit is drawn to him, from the bank teller who is disappointed when she’s released as a hostage, to the jail guard who doesn’t mind that Dillinger puts his arm around him as the reporters hold an impromptu press conference after Dillinger’s arrest.

With so many great things about “Public Enemies,” but they all seem to evaporate when you wonder how much better the movie might have been had Mann not been in the director’s chair.