( Movie Reveiw) Public Enemies 2009

Public Enemies is an alright docu-crime-thriller that, thought well-made, ends up coming out dry. Many of the scenes are well paced, but in its running time the film feels like a very rushed overview of the final years of John Dillinger. What I mean to say is that this is a good movie, but you probably won't leave the theater feeling like you've learned anything about John Dillinger, other than trivial facts.
Depp could have slid by just showboating. Instead, he lets his haunted eyes reveal the confusion, cruelty and fatalism of a criminal who knows that part of his deal is dying young (he was 31).
Having spent most of his youth locked up in prison or hideouts, Dillinger knows what he wants when he hits Chicago. "Everything — right now," he says to hatcheck girl Billie Frechette (La Vie en Rose Oscar winner Marion Cotillard), the half French-Canadian, half American Indian beauty he moves on so hard it scares her: "I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars and you. What else you need to know?"
The patter is pure Hollywood, but Depp and the vibrantly touching Cotillard give the relationship a potent intimacy. When Billie is brutalized by cops, it's not Dillinger but Purvis who steps in to make the gallant gesture. Bale excels as this dapper G-man who uses his rank as chief lieutenant to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (a superbly creepy Billy Crudup) to rise in the ranks. He's just as ready for his close-up as Dillinger.
In the film's most thrilling action sequence — the 1934 FBI raid on Dillinger and his gang at Wisconsin's Little Bohemia Lodge — tommy-gun fire explodes like Fourth of July fireworks, and Purvis once again misses getting his man. That failure prods him to set the trap at the Biograph Theatre with the help of Anna Sage (Branka Katic), a Romanian prostitute. Though we know the outcome, the shooting is handled with pulse-quickening suspense, ending with Dillinger's dying whisper. What did he say? Mann comes up with a guess, which you can believe or not.
At the end of his book, Burrough pays a visit to Dillinger's Indiana grave and runs his hand over his tombstone. He writes that it's "nothing more and nothing less than polished granite — smooth, hard, cold. Real." Mann isn't satisfied with real. Never has been. His interpretation of the facts is not that of an objective reporter but a cinema poet. Onscreen, in Depp's towering performance, Dillinger still has blood in his veins, his dreams as vivid as the crimes that debased them. Public Enemies comes at you like Dillinger did: all of a sudden. It's movie dynamite.