The Thousands

Will Christian Bale ever escape the Second Banana Curse? In Public Enemies, his character Melvin Purvis is the ostensible hero – the FBI agent who used dedication and modern policing to trap notorious bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) in 1934, despite his interfering boss J Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, putting on his best ‘old-school newsreel’ voice). It’s a role tailor-made for the increasingly humourless Bale.

Yet this is utterly Depp’s movie. Depp chooses not to play Dillinger as flamboyant or ruthless, and he looks nothing like the real Dillinger, who rather more resembled Nick Stahl. But Depp somehow captures the grace and charisma that made Dillinger a Depression-era folk hero.**Director Michael Mann specialises in glamorous cat-and-mouse chases between criminals and cops, and he’s in his element here. Shot in HD digital like Mann’s Collateral, Public Enemies feels crisp, intellectual and weirdly ahistoric. It’s almost like a western, with that genre’s leisurely pace and masculine symbolic play – extreme close-ups; dramatic perspectives; the language of guns. By contrast, the romance subplot between Dillinger and his girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) never quite convinces.