A TOMMY GUN'S MAGAZINE WORTH OF SPOILERS AHEAD
Unfortunately, PUBLIC ENEMIES is pretty weak. It's basically a shorter, watered-down version of HEAT (not that a shorter HEAT would be a bad thing -- if that movie was just over 2 hours instead of 3, like you cut the subplots with Mykelti Williamson and Ted Levine, it'd be a modern classic instead of a decent movie that's way too long). There are two major problems with the film and a number of minor ones.
Major Problem #1 -- the film touches on a number of thematic issues that could drive the story, but doesn't focus on any. So the film isn't about any one thing, lending it a very scattershot, meandering feel. PE could've been a great film about a guy who loves robbing banks and how a confluence of social factors, legal changes, and progress makes that impossible; he decides he'd rather die doing what he loves than give it up. That worked great for two of the best Westerns ever made -- BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID and THE WILD BUNCH. Or, PE could've been an interesting study of Bale's Melvin Purvis character and how he does horrible things to catch a horrible person, becoming a monster in the process (the film hints that it wanted to be about this, when we see his regret at how his agent treated Billie Freshette and his self-disgust after gunning down several men, plus the postscript about how he killed himself later in life). Or, it could've been a film like BONNIE AND CLYDE, where an outlaw couple loved what they were doing too much to stop, and how it got one of them jailed and the other killed (come to think of it, that's BADLANDS as well). Or a film about loyalty and how Dillinger constantly risks death to save his friends and loved ones. Or a film about a guy who needs to retire but has to pull one last big score in order to do it (pretty much any heist film).
Any single thematic issue would serve to clarify the film by allowing the writers and Mann to craft the plot around that thread. Instead of bouncing around to Dillinger, Billie, Purvis, the mob, and wherever else we go.
Major Problem #2 -- There's nothing to the Dillinger-Freshette romance. He thinks she's attractive and she's interested in him. That's about it. We get a line about how she's never been anywhere, so we understand why she's initially attracted to him. But that's about the extent of their relationship. It's a major force in the story, and we're supposed to believe that Dillinger would risk capture to get her out of jail because he loves her so much. But there's nothing there that shows us why or that the two of them belong together. And once she knows he's going to end up dead or in jail and she sees his brutality (in beating a jerky customer when she's working a coatcheck and when he guns down people as part of his job), there's really no good reason for her to stick around.
On to the minor problems.
The film intros Dillinger breaking his friends out of jail, where they gun down innocent guards. There's nothing wrong with showing Dillinger's loyalty, but it's hard to like a guy if he's causing unnecessary deaths the moment you meet him. I understand Mann and company are trying to be faithful to the facts, but they made a narrative film, not a documentary. This could've been solved by making the guards jerks -- we see them abusing Dillinger's gang, beating them, torturing them, taunting them that they heard Dillinger got captured and will be joining them soon. And they're going to kill him. This would serve to do a few things -- clarify the gang's relationship to Dillinger (it's pretty murky), make the audience hate the guards so that when they die, we're rooting for Dillinger and his guys, and make us fear for Dillinger when we see him go into the jail as a "prisoner," better setting up the reversal that there's a jailbreak in progress. There's a lot of other brutality in the film, such as beating the guy at the coatcheck stand, and you've got to work extra-hard to make someone like a brutal thug (see the writing in LAST KING OF SCOTLAND or THE SOPRANOS for good examples on how to do it right).
There are way too many characters. There are literally dozens of FBI agents, most of whom are indistinguishable from one another and many of whom wind up dead. When the movie ended, and I saw Rory Cochrane's name in the credits, I didn't even recall seeing him. Fewer (composite) characters for both Dillinger's gang and Purvis' men would help the audience keep track of who they are and make them more distinct.
Dillinger seems like an idiot some of the time. Main example -- the FBI is on the hunt for him. He narrowly escaped death a couple of times now. They're based in Chicago and want him dead. So what does he do? Flee the country? Leave Chicago? He hangs out there, going to see a movie with a whore and her madam. While that's what happened in real life, it doesn't make his death seem like a needless tragedy so much as inevitable, given his poor decision-making skills.
Purvis also seems stupid often. While sometimes bad guys escape due to his men's incompetence, he also causes the death of several of his men by not listening to expert advice on how to apprehend fugitives -- including waiting for backup!
There's no one to really root for. The protagonist and the antagonist both have their flaws. Dillinger doesn't have a particular goal, such as fleeing the country or pulling one more heist to get enough money to retire, so we're just watching him rob bank after bank, often resulting in people dying or at least getting badly beaten, and for no particular reason other than greed. The FBI doesn't want to apprehend Dillinger for the good of society, but instead J. Edgar Hoover wants it to build his power-base at the FBI and Purvis wants to do it out of embarrassment/fear of being shown up.
Hopefully HARRY POTTER will be better, as that's the next movie this summer I'm looking forward to.
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