The Case for Real American Heroes

I felt a bit like a gangster myself when, with the posse attending the Public Enemies screening, we stared down those who had sat in our allocated seats until they got the hint that we were invoking our ticketed rights and moved on, with few words exchanged and no apologies proffered. The surrender of our seats took us straight through to the start of the movie, and so then were plunged into a more violent world of gangster behaviour than the one we ourselves had briefly inhabited.

First off, let me rave about the cast: it is a fairly impressive line up of thesping talent and, given the state of the movie itself, they manage to do a huge amount with what little they are given. Johnny Depp and Billy Crudup manage to stand out from their minimal dialogue and least bring their dialogue off the page and inject some life into it. Marion Cotillard (who would ever recognise her from her Edith Piaf days?) is the only character given a range of emotions, and despite her limited screen time and dialogue, makes the most of what she is given.

The rest of the cast are impressive for their bad boy credentials if not their actual characters. Even Christian Bale, used to playing intense psychos, is kind of left in the cold as the “good guy” – Depp’s character gets all the good lines and action, and even then he is hard to like, so Bale doesn’t really stand much of a chance bringing any substance to his role. I also spotted Stephen “the” Dorff in the background, finally showing some signs of aging, and the fantastic Diana Krall makes a brief appearance, though her mighty lungs are heard several times on the soundtrack.

Ah, the soundtrack. While the visuals and action scenes are amazing, as one would expect from a Michael Mann movie, and the actual story is fairly thin (again something MM movies specialise in; see Heat), there is the oddest disconnect between the images and the score. The film is shot very starkly, with hand held cameras, and the action scenes are grittily realistic. In comparison, the music swings wildly from period jazz to an overly-emotional orchestral score, that seems to have been written and recorded in complete isolation to the movie, and just inserted randomly at the end. One final scene, where the orchestral score is swelling melodramatically in the background as it follows a character entering a room, is jarringly just ended as soon as dialogue begins – no transition, no sense of a purposeful “stop”. It just ends.

The soundtrack is thus a real distraction to the really good things in the film. It also emphasises the films flaws. A brilliant action film, beautiful (if occasionally gory) gun scenes, but a very shallow film character-wise, with a script empty of real passion and energy, the only real depth coming from what the actors bring with them. There are meaningless subplots and dead ends that may have been inserted to add context but are more just a distraction, so little do they actually bring to the main story. It’s a bit of a mess really, but a pretty one.

Verdict: Public Enemies makes it very hard to tell who to hate more: the Chicago criminal underground, or J Edgar Hoover’s fairly psychotic FBI. The real enemy though is an abysmal soundtrack. Perhaps a future DVD release will rectify this through a remixing of the sound – more Diana Krall please. Michael Mann does great action movies – its everything else around it that disappoints. 6 street shootouts out of 10.