Film: Public Enemies

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard

Rating: ***

Running at: Inox (Forum, City Centre, Swabhumi)

There is a metatextual moment in Michael Mann’s epically mounted cop and robber drama, Public Enemies. Notorious bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is watching a Clark Gable –Myrna Loy gangster flick in a cinema hall. The film he is watching has Clark Gable playing a character with an eerie similarity to him. As Dillinger identifies with the gangster’s life, laughs and cries with him, we, the audience, identify with Dillinger for the very first time in the film. Otherwise, the central protagonist of Public Enemies is so remote as a persona, so brittle, that he almost manages to alienate the audience.

On paper, Public Enemies is little more than another killing-spree entertainment from the director of such searing dramas such as Heat, Collateral and The Insider. Drawing from the life of real-life American gangster of the 1930s, John Dillinger, Mann treats the film as a crime saga about cops and robbers in Chicago. It starts with deaths and concludes with many more, as innocent bystanders lie dead and wounded in the streets following a botched bank robbery.

But if Public Enemies tells a shopworn story, full of upstart cops, professional criminals and random deaths, it does so on a high aesthetic plane. The film is typically Mann, dense, sleek and brooding, with brilliantly executed set pieces (the barn crossfire is hypnotically executed). Mann’s choice to shoot a period movie in High Digital format gives it a quasi-documentary feel which is not in cohesion with the dramatic interplay between the characters. However, all this add good weight and tension to the film and provides the ensemble cast with ample opportunities to do honest, probing work, surprisingly they fail.

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