Public Enemies Pretty, if Rote

Mann's film is visually luscious, but some find it rote
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 1, 2009 2:39 AM CDT

The trailer for 'Public Enemies'
(phase9tv)

Critics mostly like Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s lusciously shot—if not terribly deep—ode to ‘30s gangster life with Johnny Depp as bank robber John Dillinger.

  • The film is a "beautiful work of art," declares Manohla Dargis for the New York Times, "a vividly realistic portrait of a country deep in depression and jumping with bad men, which looks and plays like no other American gangster film."

  • Likewise, David Denby finds Enemies to be "a ravishing dream of violent gangster life in the thirties," though "emotionally neutered," he writes for the New Yorker.
  • But Keith Phipps of the Onion AV Club finds it rote: "Depp goes about the business of not getting caught; Bale goes about the business of catching him. Mann reduces a legendary game of cat-and-mouse to a standard police procedural."

(More Johnny Depp stories.)

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