John Dillinger wants to steal your money

Here’s what I want you to do.  Take a stroll to your local video rental establishment or log onto your Netflix account.  Seek out a 2002 movie called The Road to Perdition.  Rent it, watch it, and I can almost guarantee you an enjoyable cinematic experience.  It’s got the esteemed Mr. Tom Hanks supported by no less than Jude Law, Daniel Craig, and man’s man Paul Newman in one of his last great performances.  It’s got bank robberies, shoot-outs, car chases, three-piece suits, the works.  Sounds good, right?  That’s cause it fucking is.  The recently released Public Enemies also boasts a powerhouse cast, and more gun battles and bank heists than you can shake a stick at.  To say the least, equally promising.  So tell me: why was it so fucking lame?

The people have spoken

Public Enemies, much to my surprise, was like a day-old plate of cheese fries with a hearty helping of lame sauce – for two and half hours.  Jack Sparrow vs. Batman with fedoras and tommy guns? A movie like that should never, ever allow me to think, “Gee… I kinda want to sneak out of the theatre and see Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.”  But every ten minutes I’d tune out Johnny Depp and think, “Ya know, I hear the Decepticons are bigger this time.”

I guess I’m writing a review.  If you read further, I will spoil the film.  But this isn’t like spoiling some awesome, fresh, delicious milk, this is like spoiling some weird processed strawberry milk chug you buy at the C-store, in that no one should care.  Johnny Depp gets shot in the face and Marion Cotillard pees herself.  Consider it spoiled.  Anyway, review.  Apparently some critics like this film.  Mystifying.  Manohla Dargis calls Michael Mann “a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look.”  I’ll say.  If I took out the engine to my car and replaced it with rubber bands and paper clips, I’d be changing the way cars run, but it’s important to mention that I’d also making it shittier.

If you wanna talk look, I think this movie looks like a piece of crap.  Mann is obsessed with high-def digital video, which makey no sense in the 30s.  Excepting this flagrantly poor filmmaking decision, the movie for the most part was not so much bad as vague and awkward.  It felt distant.  A good example would be the love story between Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard (whose inconsistent accent adds to the mystique of the film as you try to guess where the fuck she is from) if indeed “love story” is the phrase you want to use.  This plotline popped up at familiar times as if on cue, but it lacked any substantiation or connection, while Depp and Cotillard showed all the chemistry and magnetism of a drunken hook-up.  They kept saying that they loved each other, but if Mann showed it, I missed it.  Plus, at one point I think Johnny Depp gives it to Marion Cottilard up the butt.  Again, with this movie I’m never entirely sure what I’m looking at, but on this occasion it seemed like what I was looking at was anal.  Why?  Dunno.  Oh, and that scene when Marion Cotillard pees herself in the interrogation room and Christian Bale picks her up and carries her to the bathroom?  I’m just staring at the screen with my jaw dropped.  I just… er… aw.  You see what I mean?  Vague and awkward.

This scene was no on the sexy, yes on the awkward.

My favorite character was Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover.  Of the countless talented actors in the movie, somehow he is the one person who turned in a performance I actually cared about enough to pay attention to.  Too bad he does jack shit, with about three minutes of screen time.  Whatever, at least he beat Channing Tatum, who, in his 45 seconds of screen time, gets shot in the belly and says two sentences.  If you want to see Channing’s performance, see the trailer.  It’s edited better than the film.

This is basically it.

But yeah, Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard.  I’ve seen these actors before.  They’re good.  Hell, they’re some of the best.  So what did Michael Mann do to them?  Depp’s Dillinger looks awesome.  His outfits are great, his scowls are terrific, his performance is meh.  His mustache comes and goes.  I just wish he’d done something, but instead he sorta glides through the movie, raising his eyebrows and muttering from time to time.  I should mention that he leads a cast in which everyone (except Crudup) is unintelligible say… 70% of the time.  Cotillard really struggles with this movie.  It sounds like she really struggles with speaking English.  Her acting, too, was cheap and shaky.  She does romantic scenes, sad scenes, angry scenes, each of which manages to be dumb in its own special way.  And I can’t remember a single thing Christian Bale did in the whole movie.  There was no trademark Bale intensity in this character, who lacked a discernible personality.  He was just intensely boring.  As my friend Will remarked, “as soon as Christian Bale’s name was Melvin, it was all over.

Perhaps that dumb fucking script was really to blame.  What Manohla Dargis calls “vividly realistic” I call “crappy,” a heavy-handed and meandering story that crams some really preposterous bullshit down the viewers’ throats.  Well I don’t like the taste of bullshit, and I’m not buying most of what this movie’s selling, at least in terms of human emotion or motivation.  At least they make fun of Indiana a bit.  I guess that’s a start.

There may have been highlights of the film that didn’t stick in my memory.  There was a torture scene that mildly piqued my interest but I mostly missed it, as at the moment taking notes in my cell-phone for this review piqued my interest more.  I will concede that there was one exceptionally good scene in a police station towards the end of the film, after which the general quality of the movie picked up marginally.  But those ten minutes couldn’t save the previous 130 minutes of suck.  Furthermore, all the worthwhile material from that film could have squeezed into 90 concise minutes, instead of wasting an hour when I should have been at home with my X-Box, playing Godfather: The Game, which delivers everything Public Enemies bitched out on.

"Godfather: The Game" is fucking rad.

But what about all the action?  Good flippin’ question.  If I could’ve seen it, I’d tell you about it.  One thing I like a lot about plays, that I’m starting to dislike more and more about movies, is that onstage you can see what the hell is happening.  The shaky camerawork that succeeded in Bourne Ultimatum bombed in Public Enemies.  I knew guns were going off, I knew people were running around, but I couldn’t tell you who or why.  At one point a man who looked like Johnny Depp got out of a car I thought Johnny Depp had been in, and got shot to death by the cops.  I breathed a sigh of relief that the movie was over.  Turns out Johnny Depp was somewhere else and it was just shitty filmmaking that had confused me.  In fact, we had another hour of bullshit to sit through before they finally busted a cap in Dillinger’s ass.

This looks awesome! Why wasn't it awesome?!

When you get down to it, the biggest problem with this film is Michael “Stupid Mofo” Mann and his preposterous ideas about film.  Sometimes the digital video was so wildly cheap as to look like some weird home movie in which people shot each other, or perhaps a dreadful history channel reenactment.  Tommy gun car chase action sequences shot on a multi-million dollar budget should never make me think history channel.  And I mean, some wicked stuff happens.  The feat is how they manage to make it look lame.  I mean, I made better-looking movies than this is middle school, in fifteen minutes.  In fact…

Seven minutes, zero dollars.  And I didn’t waste nearly as much time.  What up, Michael Mann?  So now everybody knows what happens in Public Enemies.  So you don’t have to see it! If you want to see Johnny Depp, see Pirates of the Carribean.  If you want to see Tommy Guns, see Road to Perdition.  If you want to see criminals sitting in cabins and contemplating existence, see the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  For federal gangster takedowns see the Untouchables, for historically accurate action see Tombstone, for prison escapes see Shawshank Redemption.  For Chicago bank robberies, you can see Spider Man 2, for fuck’s sake.  I promise you there is nothing Public Enemies can offer you that you can’t find done way better in some other movie.  Sometimes even done way better by Doctor Octopus.

Look at that little Doc Ock, he's adorable

In fact I’ve got a recommendation.  Public Enemies, not unlike its aforementioned sex scene and its ambiguous anal, is lifeless and dull.  But it’s not the only thing I’ve seen this week.  I also watched the Patrick Chewing snickers commercial about 47 times.

It is entertaining, well-acted, easy to follow, and concise.  It’s is everything Public Enemies is not.  So stay away from that gangster disappointment, watch this rockin’ commercial, and save your money.  I’ve got tons of youtube videos I can recommend if you ever need the entertainment that badly.

In conclusion…

Road to Perdition

Yes.

Public Enemies

No.

Snickers Commercial

Very yes.

Thank you for your time.  I hope you have a Public Enemies-less day.