Release Date: July 1, 2009

(out of 4)

Michael Mann’s ambitious "Public Enemies" is infused with luster, glitz, flair, firepower, egomania, ball-busting and bravado. This is one of those rare movies that is larger than life. In the means that our everyday lives pale in comparison. The movie sees recklessness and exhilaration as two of the same. At its center, John Dillinger is a bold and brash personality who dared to turn his criminal persona into something cool, the movie suggests, saying he was a bad guy but he was a bad guy that had a certain class and style about him. He had criminal chic – he even charmed the newspapers when he was caught. Johnny Depp, in a disarming performance, nails the John Dillinger of 1933.

The movie opens by letting us know that the Great Depression was the golden age of bank robbery. There are several bank robberies throughout the film (enough of them that afterwards you play them back in your head and select your favorite), and most were successful, while some of them eventually caught up to the arrest of Dillinger. Yet you couldn’t hold him back, Dillinger was a specialist at prison break and this movie makes prison break look like some kind of a sport.

On the trail of Dillinger and his gang is FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) and his top agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). Crudup plays Hoover as an impersonal but arrogant blowhard, who is all about enhancing his own reputation. Bale plays Purvis as a joyless but consummate professional (Bale literally appears to be having no fun with his performance, yet somehow he’s perversely intriguing). Their job is never-ending seriousness when it comes to tracking Dillinger and his associates. After a few failures, a specialized expanded department to hunt down Dillinger is created. They chase Dillinger all over the country, but when all else fails they always presume that he will return to Chicago to pick up his “bye-bye blackbird” love Billie Freschette (Marion Cotillard) whom inevitably and regrettably he has left behind.

The courtship is dramatized in the movie earlier. By the way, how many audiences prior to seeing this new that Dillinger was entangled in such an engrossing love story? A simple coat check girl, Billie is immediately swept by Dillinger’s brazen and strident personality. When she says that she knows nothing about him, he gives her a rundown of his childhood and concludes, “I like fancy clothes, I like fast cars and I like you.” That’s all you need to know, is Dillinger’s attitude. Depp’s snappy and assertive delivery, without ever misplacing his swagger-hip veneer, will erupt audiences in applause everywhere. The future with Dillinger, an on-the-fly improviser, is always in the present.

The action in the movie, often photographed on the shoulder of Depp, is stupendous (only the opening scene is cut too choppy, yet it has an exuberant adrenaline), but it’s always just as important as the production décor which is sublime. The movie expands your imagination of what the 1930’s looked and felt like – the movie has a tangible texture that ekes through your memory vividly after it’s all over.

Never overtly, but underlined, the movie insinuates that Dillinger was a criminal ahead of his time. Depp plays him like a man who knew how to exploit on the naïveté of the 1930’s peoples. When he abducted people, he made attempts to turn their transitory abduction into merriment. His adventures are such a carnival-esque ride to him, even in the episodes of grim circumstance. He wasn’t out to intentionally hurt people (at least not in his mind), although cohorts like Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) wreaked unnecessary violence on innocent people. Dillinger, who is handy with his tommy gun, didn’t blast people away mindlessly, although cops to him are a merciless target.

This excitingly mounted docudrama and action epic is undoubtedly the work of Michael Mann whose film “Heat” with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino happens to be one of my 100 favorite movies of all-time. Yet Mann admittedly disappointed me with his last three films. The dispassionate “Ali” and “Miami Vice” were diffused of personality and “Collateral” had contrived jeopardy staging. “Public Enemies” has a much sturdier agenda and artistic statement, and contains a provocative multi-layered ideology on how one man like Dillinger goes about in owning an era – everybody lives according to Dillinger’s reality. Dillinger is the center and everybody gravitates towards him. Mann’s latest film, devoid of any faulty detours, is certainly that larger than life sprawling epic done the way Michael Mann does it best. And Dillinger is that larger than life character that is worthy of Michael Mann’s talents.