MOVIE REVIEW
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Public Enemies Pretty, if Rote
Mann's film is visually luscious, but some find it rote
By Nick McMaster
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Posted Jul 1, 09 2:39 AM CDT
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(Newser)
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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."