This film is a great example of an amazing opportunity totally missed. You have a dynamic anti-hero who has lots of machine guns, set in perhaps the most aesthetically beautiful era with great looking suits and dresses and cars and buildings. Add to this a gigantic cast and a top-level director ... and yet this is a dull and sloppy movie that goes into directions it shouldn't and never gets to a real pay-off.
This is the story of John Dillinger's year-long bank robbery spree and the F.B.I. chase that worked to catch him and his gang - and ultimately killed him.
The script is totally messy. There is some snappy dialogue, but those moments are few and far between. The plot meanders in sometimes non-linear-feeling directions (I'm still not totally sure if the opening jail break happens at the chronological beginning of the story or if that's a middle-point shown first). I think small touches - like small titles telling you where you are and when you are - would have made the flow much clearer. Many times I was bored or lost and could never totally get my head around all the secondary characters and their names and relationships to Dillinger.
One of my biggest gripes with the script and direction is that so much time is wasted time on Dillinger's love life with a half-French lady. Though it might be historically accurate, who the hell cares? Dillinger is a bank robber. That he screwed a lady - and that she happened to be half French - means nothing to me. (I can't help but think that the half-Frenchness of the lady had a lot to do with the producer's desire to cast Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard... that the character wasn't just American never totally made sense to me and just read as an unnecessary layer of complication.)
This is a problem I have with lots of movies - like Kasdan's Wyatt Earp - I don't care about Earp's background - I only care about the OK Corral. I don't care about Dillinger's sex life - I care about his bank robberies. It would be one thing if his love life was used as a window into how charming and masculine he was - or better yet, if his love life was somehow his Achilles heel and the cause of his ultimate downfall. But instead, we just seen him flirting with a lady at a dance, then moving in with her and then falling in love with her. So what?! We never get any psychological depth from the Dillinger character.
From a directing point of view, I expect a lot more out of Michael Mann. He has done wonderful tight stories in the past - and this is anything but that. All the great actors fall flat - especially Christian Bale, whose character is totally forgettable.
One thing I hate is that there are a ton of sloppy mistakes that could have been easily fixed. For instance, there's an important scene when a bunch of men are listening to a baseball game on the radio in downtown Chicago. Dillinger comes in and asks what the score of the game is. One man answers something like, 'Cubs are winning, 7-5'. The next thing we hear is the radio announcer saying, 'And the Yankees come up to bat'. But in 1934, the Cubs and Yankees never played each other. This is sloppy and stupid and would have been easy to fix. It could have been a White Sox-Yankees game or the Cubs could have been playing the Cardinals or Giants or any other team in the National League. Dumb.
Probably the best thing in the movie is the wonderful costumes and art direction. The beautiful Art Deco style of the time is captured wonderfully and makes the most mundane scenes visually delicious. At one point, Cotillard mentions that she's wearing a $3 dress (that's 1933 $3 - so adjust for inflation - but I gather that that's cheap), but it looks amazing. If only the producers spent as much effort and money on a script and concept as they did on the look of the picture.
Overall this is a movie that looks good and plays bad. I wanted to like this movie a lot, but I just couldn't. There was too much wrong with it - and that's really terrible for a veteran director like Mann.
Stars: 1 of 4
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