Public Enemies: In Which Johnny Depp and Christian Bale Attempt to Out-Cool Each Other for Two and a Half Hours

Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from the eccentricities of the world and see Johnny Depp in his slicked-back mode (see also: Finding Neverland, Chocolat, The Libertine, and all those other “grown-up” movies he does now and then to keep things interesting). Whereas when it comes to Christian Bale, he’s pretty much always in slicked-back mode (unless he’s in freakishly-disturbing-yet-still-entertaining-Internet-meme mode), so watching him perform is always comforting and familiar and very, very satisfying.

And the combination of these two cucumber-cool not-really-opposing forces is rather mesmerizing. Watching Public Enemies, there’s almost always someone on the screen who’s doing something that’s fun to watch.

Which is good, because otherwise the movie is kind of hit or miss.

It’s a biopic of John Dillinger, a Depression-era bank robber who became a folk hero because back then people thought it was neat when you stuck it to the man. Depp plays Dillinger; Bale plays Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent assigned to hunt Dillinger down.

And there are also a ton of other people in there. It’s one of those movies that’s full of white guys who all look alike. And it’s even worse here than it was in, like, The Departed, because here they all wear the same outfits (black hat, black coat, white shirt, brown holster, shiny shoes – hey, it was the ‘30s). It also doesn’t help that they all have names like “Baby Face” and “Pretty Boy.” In fact, there are so many of these guys and they’re styled so similarly that I didn’t realize until I visited IMDB that various gangsters were played by actors I like, including Giovanni Ribisi and David Wenham.  And Billy Crudup played J. Edgar Hoover! Totally didn’t even recognize him with the slicked-down ‘do.

John Dillinger was, at least according to this movie, the variety of criminal who was ruthless when he needed to be but had a conscience and was overall a very decent guy. And Melvin Purvis could be described in much the same way. Purvis allows suspects to be tortured, but then he feels kind of bad about it. Dillinger beats people up and throws them outside moving vehicles sometimes, but only when they really deserve it, and if a pretty female hostage looks cold he’ll gallantly give her his coat before he ties her to a tree in the woods and leaves her there. They’re all perfect gentlemen when you get down to it.

And several sequences in the movie are best described as “awesome.” Naturally, all of them were of the action variety – prison breaks, bank robberies, and a very cool sequence at the end that I won’t spoil except to note that it starts off with, of all people, Leelee Sobieski (remember her?).  Those were sit-up-and-grin sequences, the kind of moments that are the reason people go see movies – to watch something happen on screen that simply represents delightful storytelling, brilliantly executed by a good director and great actors, revolving around an intriguing larger story.

The problem is, there weren’t enough of those moments in Public Enemies. With a movie like this, I want a boom-boom-boom Bourne-Identity-style story, where the hits keep coming one after the other. This movie has lots of long pauses where groups of, like, 20 identical guys hang out in movie theaters plotting their next heist, which is never quite as lucrative as they think it’s going to be. Plus, partly as a result of all the aforementioned identicalness among the male characters, some of the action sequences are hard to follow. There’s one very long sequence at night, in some woods, where everyone is driving around in identical black cars and wearing identical black clothes and hats and the automatic weapons are blaring at everyone and I knew Johnny Depp and Christian Bale were in there and I was pretty sure neither of them was dead yet but so many people were bleeding all over the place that it was hard to tell.

Also, I should mention that there was a B-plot romance. It was more fully fleshed than I expected for such a guy-centered movie, but it still wasn’t particularly engaging. Marion Cotillard was great though, and made me care about a character whom I initially had no intention of caring about.

There are lots of reasons I’m glad I’m not currently living in 1933, and this movie hit on several. Not to say that I think our current law enforcement system is perfect in any way, but I’m pretty sure that in 2009 I’m unlikely to have FBI agents randomly break into my apartment and start shooting out the window at people in the street who may or may not be alleged gangsters, if only because they wouldn’t want to deal with the paperwork for the inevitable lawsuit.

Speaking of which, has anyone ever made a biopic of J. Edgar Hoover? I’ve only ever seen him portrayed one way, both in fiction and in documentaries, and I want to know more about the guy. He must have been multidimensional. Public Enemies does a decent job of showing that he wasn’t just a psycho, that he had motivating factors for the things he did (in this case, trying desperately to get John Dillinger by any means necessary for the sake of the fledgling FBI’s PR issues). But J.E.H. had a partner, right? Someone liked him enough to put up with him. There had to be more going on with him than unethical careerism.

And finally, as a side note, if you’re ever in D.C. on a Tuesday night and you have a hankering to go see a movie that you would like to actually hear and/or pay attention to, do not, I repeat, do not go to the $5 special at the Union Station AMC. You’ll thank me someday for warning you. I will not read you my full list of grievances from the experience that was attempting to follow Public Enemies in such an environment, but suffice to say I might at least have noticed David Wenham were I not cowering in fear of the passel of screaming six-year-olds stampeding up and down the aisle for the entire show.