Public Enemies

Wow, I did not enjoy Public Enemies. How much did I not enjoy it? So much that I can’t even write an intro on it. I mean, come on Michael Mann. It’s Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, one as John Dillinger and the other as Melvin Purvis. How could you mess this up as badly as you did? The thing that really gets me going is that I know older audiences and critics are going to love it because they enjoy slurping Mann’s movies and they tend to praise all period pieces.

The trending topic on PE leading up to its release was Mann’s decision to shoot in digital high definition. This isn’t a new stylistic choice for Mann; his two previous films have both been shot the same way. Collateral 3/4 of a great movie and the HD really worked. The cinematography really fit with the film’s gritty and up-close style. With Miami Vice, I was impartial to the HD, mainly because I was too busy concentrating on how much the rest of the movie sucked. The difference between those two films and PE is that the latter is a period piece, and the HD looks terrible.

I’ve been anticipating this movie since it’s pre-production stage, and my heart broke when I saw this first trailer. The HD looked so terrible that I wasn’t sure if I could watch the movie. Dan Trachtenberg of “The Totally Rad Show” put it best when he said “HD is the way the world really looks, but film is how I want the world to look.” I have eyes; I know how the real world looks. I go to the movies to see the worlds that our created. The thing about HD is that it creates a realistic feel and connection for the audience. It makes the movie look as realistic as possible. When applied to a period piece, it looks realistic, but realistic in the sense that it looks like a set. It looked like people playing dress-up. They try to look, and talk, and act like people from the depression era and it just doesn’t work. Mann makes this movie look like a reality show rather than the huge gangster drama it should be.

It might have been bearable to watch if Mann had stuck with a steady cam for the movie’s duration. Instead, for all of the action scenes (and some dialogue scenes), Mann switches to a handheld camera. Now, I love theBourne trilogy’s shaky cam look, and I wasn’t bothered by it in Cloverfield, but it was unbearable in this film. It seemed as though the cinematographer had no experience using one before. They might as well have let me film the action scenes. HD also looks terrible when the camera is forced to move quickly. Everything blends together and it’s very hard to see what’s going on. As if it isn’t bad enough, Mann chose to change the frame speed, likely in a an attempt to make things seem chaotic, but instead makes the film feel very cheap.

There are other technical aspects that are wrong with the movie, which really shows me that the crew was not trying their hardest. When I left the theater, I contemplated asking for my money back because the sound wasn’t right. Turns out that it wasn’t the theater’s fault, but rather that of the sound editing. Whoever did the sound for this movie should return their salary because it was an abysmal job (hopefully my cousin didn’t work on it, because I’ll feel like a jerk for saying that). The pitch of the voices changes throughout the movie, and the location of sounds is off. The score of the movie was very overbearing, often trying to force emotions on to me. I’ve seen enough movies that I know how to feel during them. I also contend that a score should only heighten the emotion, rather than create. If the scene has no emotion without the score, a little bit of music isn’t going to change that.

From a screenplay standpoint, the film is also weak. For a movie that is two and a half hours long, there is a real lack of depth and development. We’re told that Dillinger is a hero of the people, but are never shown why this is the case. All of his dialogue seems to a series of one liners. Depp does a good job with what he is given, and conveys Dillinger’s cool demeanor. Bale also does a good job, despite not having enough screen time. Again, the actors are more acting like 1930’s people rather than becoming 1930’s people. They simply have nothing to base their performances on, and if the movie had felt more like a stylized recreation of the Great Depression, rather than a poorly made documentary on the subject, then the performances might have worked.

The sad part is that this film has some really great moments that are completely wasted. I would love to see what a better director, one with a distinct visual style could have done with this. There is a good movie somewhere in Public Enemies, but due to Mann’s direction, we don’t get to see it.