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Dir. Michael Mann
Rating: 5.7 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
Michael Mann is a director of considerable skill and talent, but too often seems content to instead be a facilitator of excellent art direction and little more. When focused, as in The Insider he can be strikingly effective; but at his worst -- and Collateral certainly comes to mind, if not the vastly overrated Heat -- he's all about the window dressing: soulless, flashy, and as nutritionally satisfying as a Tootsie Pop. With his new gangster epic about the fall of John Dillinger, he's just about dead-smack in the middle. When we first see him, Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is shackled, in tow with what appears to be a special agent, being brought into prison. Naturally, this doesn't last long. Dillinger's crime spree -- his specialty was robbing banks in under 3 minutes, charming the customers even as he was robbing the government blind -- eventually begins to embarrass newly appointed head of the FBI, J.Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), who appoints Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) as his point man in Chicago to nab Dillinger, who is busy robbing banks, having fun, and falling in love with a coat-check girl, Billie (Marion Cotillard). The film certainly has star power to burn -- included in this excellent cast in small roles are Giovanni Ribisi, Lili Taylor, Stephen Lang and Leelee Sobieski -- and Depp almost can't help but be charismatically likable. But that's about all the character is given. The script, by Mann, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, is thin as gruel, each scene rushed to conclude so that the point can be made and the plot can continue rolling on. As a result, we never really get inside any of the character's heads. Because of Depp's chops, we like the guy, but we know as little about him as the average mook on the street. Purvis is even more of a blank slate, seeming without a single distinguishing characteristic. Certainly there are some well-filmed action scenes, and more than a few good moments, but a jail-break scene involving Dillinger waiting at a red light in an escape car is one of the few times Mann seems to actually let the scene come to him, rather than power rushing through it. Much time and care has been made to make the period details just right -- a tommy-gun echoes with a satisfyingly hitchy recoil; a newspaper's heavy-lidded cinema listings are suitably compact; a Chicago gangster-loaded hot-spot has the nervous energy of a Vegas prize fight -- but, alas, not nearly as much attention was paid to the characters' souls.
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