Movie Review: Public Enemies

The human chameleon that is Johnny Depp has effortlessly mutated into Depression-era desperado John Dillinger for director Michael Mann's ”Public Enemies.”

Charismatic, funny, dangerous … Depp blends derring-do, cocky self-confidence, sly sexuality and a bit of madness to give us a crook we can cheer for.

He is the tireless motor that drives the film and is the main reason it succeeds. Though well-mounted, “Public Enemies” is a fairly generic crime drama filled with underdeveloped characters. Without Depp's weight, the film would be flimsy.

In adapting Bryan Burrough's sprawling nonfiction best-seller, Mann and co-writers Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman jump on two story lines. First there's the relationship between Dillinger and nightclub hatcheck girl Billie Frechette (Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard), a doomed Bonnie-and-Clyde romance.

Then there are the G-men – top federal cop J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) and especially agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), who are determined to bring down the working-class gangsters who shot up the Midwest in the early '30s.

Depp's tasty performance views Dillinger as a folk hero in the making.

Dillinger would clean out the vault but leave untouched the cash held by individual customers, saying he was there for the bank's money, not theirs. At a time when many had seen their savings wiped out in bank collapses, this was sweet revenge.

While some members of his gang – particularly the psychopathic Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) – were crazed killers, Dillinger seems to have shown restraint. It's never been proven that a bullet fired by him killed anyone.

Mann's film faithfully re-creates some of the book's most memorable moments, like Dillinger's daring escape from an Indiana jail using a “gun” carved from wood and the FBI's wintry nighttime shootout with the gang at a remote Wisconsin resort.

“Public Enemies” attempts to establish a sort of personal duel between the taunting, charming crook and Bale's grim, unemotional lawman. But the film's true emotional core lies in the Dillinger/Frechette affair. Cotillard is excellent as the unremarkable young woman who falls hard for the electric excitement radiating from her lover's every pore.

Depp is so dominant here that Mann's casting of familiar faces in smaller roles – Stephen Dorff, Giovanni Ribisi, Leelee Sobieski, Lili Taylor – seems a bit distracting.

A few manage to make an impression. Peter Gerety has a scene-stealing moment as Dillinger's mobbed-up lawyer, delivering an impassioned courtroom speech (one pulled directly from the trial record). Graham's crazed Nelson is hard to forget.

And Stephen Lang is powerfully intense as a lethal old Texas lawman brought in to show Hoover's college-boy agents how to track down and kill a bad man.

The film's violence is furious and graphic. Occasionally it is genuinely upsetting, as in the FBI's brutal interrogation of Billie Frechette (this was way before Miranda rights).

Best of all, Mann and his cast achieve a grim atmosphere of fatal inevitability as the net slowly tightens around Dillinger and his free-wheeling criminal cohorts.