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Public Enemies

PUBLIC ENEMIES directed by Michael Mann, written by Ronan Bennett, Mann and Ann Biderman based on the book by Bryan Burrough, with Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard. A Universal release. 140 minutes. Now playing. For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: N


Here’s a funny thing about digital video: it makes Christian Bale disappear. His cheekbones recede into his face, and those glittering gimlet eyes turn a dull black. All the charisma and personality he can muster on film just goes away.[rssbreak]

It’s not entirely his fault, though. In Public Enemies, Bale is stuck playing the thankless role of Melvin Purvis, the fed who brought down John Dillinger, and Michael Mann just isn’t that interested in Melvin Purvis. But he’s honour-bound to spend half his movie with him all the same.

Mann insists on telling the Dillinger-Purvis story as a carbon copy of his 1995 cops-and-robbers epic Heat, recycling entire scenes from that script (itself an expansion of his 1989 TV-movie L.A. Takedown), with cardboard gangster characters. But he’s shot the whole thing in extreme close-up with his beloved flyweight cameras, filling the screen with eyeballs and cheekbones at the expense of visual or spatial context.

As Dillinger, Johnny Depp gets the De Niro role of the weary but honourable crook who falls in love while contemplating one last score. As Purvis, Bale plays a less defined version of Pacino’s driven cop who’ll stop at almost nothing to bring down his quarry.

The difference between Heat and Public Enemies is that the former bothered to create characters and immerse us in their world, while Public Enemies just drops us into a series of haphazardly shot, chaotically edited scenes in which a bunch of men in hats and coats run into banks and grab bags of money while other men in hats and coats stand outside and shoot at them.

That could still have worked, but the damn DV cameras flatten out the image and turn night scenes alternately liquid and grainy. A key gun battle at a rural hotel looks like it was shot with security cameras, which is not the look one traditionally associates with the Great Depression.

Mann even gives his stars one scene together in the middle of the movie, just as he did with Bobby and Al, so we can marvel at the intensity and commitment of these two very different professionals.

Heat’s big faceoff ends in a draw Public Enemies is on Dillinger’s side all the way. Bale never really had a chance.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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