Public Enemies

Forget ‘Miami Vice,’ forget ‘Collateral’ and you may forget ‘Ali,’ ‘Public Enemies’ is the finest Michael Mann film since 1999′s ‘The Insider’ and deserves to rank alongside that film and ‘Heat’ as the best of the director’s output.

It is a thrilling thing.

‘Public Enemies’ centres on (roughly) the final year in the life of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), bank robber, jailbreaker and America’s first public enemy. Dillinger and his associates are tracked by Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), golden boy of the nascent FBI, at the behest of the bureau’s ambitious director J Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup).

‘Public Enemies’ is not a film that loses focus for one second, from the opening prison scene to the coda of a tearfully incarcerated Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). It is spare and lush, debonair and downbeat. It is epic and minimal and could not have been made by anybody other than the Mann himself.

Mann has been criticised for his decision to shoot the film in a high definition digital format - something he first tried on the far more contrived ‘Collateral’ - with his detractors insisting that a film with such a historic resonance should be given all the grandiosity of celluloid.

Not so. The film’s immediacy is one of its greatest strengths and something that could not have been managed using conventional means.

As Dillinger is cornered at the Little Bohemia Lodge you feel like you’re in the room with him, cowering from every bullet and shattered window overhead, such is the power of Mann’s chosen medium. The entire scene is a breathless experience and every part the equal of the LA shootout of ‘Heat’.

There are plenty of comparisons to be made between ‘Public Enemies’ and the seminal crime thriller from 1995 - Dillinger’s insistence to a bank customer that he is taking their money, not his, is pure Neil McCauley - but these are two very different beasts.

For one thing, Depp doesn’t show the chilled calculation of De Niro’s McCauley, he’s having far too good a time to focus on the aftermath. Also, Bale’s Purvis is driven not by his lust for Dillinger’s blood, but by his own careerism. There is no ‘coffee shop’ moment between Purvis and Dillinger, just a brief jailhouse confrontation that speaks more to their disinterest in each other than anything else.

If the film falls down anywhere, it’s here. Whoever decided to market ‘Public Enemies’ as Depp v Bale got it wrong. Bale’s Purvis never really takes flight, and seems throughout to be nothing more than the plaything of Hoover. Performance-wise it isn’t the Welsh actor’s finest hour as he’s rarely asked to extend beyond more than studied calculation.

No, this is Depp’s film. Shorn of the bells and whistles of his frequent Tim Burton escape acts, divorced from Captain Jack Sparrow’s mascara, Depp makes compelling viewing. This is his most charismatic performance to date, and his scenes with the brilliant Cotillard fizz perfectly, not to mention his doomed camaraderie with cohorts such as Jason Clarke’s ‘Red’ Hamilton.

A word, too, on the sountrack which mixes Elliot Goldenthal’s soaring strings with 30s standards and lifts the film further into greatness.