You wouldn’t know it today, but St. Paul used to be a hotbed of criminal activity during the Depression. Ma Barker spent some time hiding out in St. Paul, as did Machine Gun Kelly. And John Dillinger, the infamous bank robber and subject of Michael Mann’s latest film Public Enemies, also made St. Paul his home for a brief while. The movie makes no mention of Dillinger’s sojourn in Minnesota, but it does follow his trail of mayhem through Indiana, Chicago, and Wisconsin. Mann has always been fascinated with dangerous men and their dangerous business; Public Enemies is no different. Johnny Depp inhabits Dillinger’s character with a retro mixture of charm and malice that hearkens back to the early days of Hollywood. The movie even draws a sly comparison between Depp and past leading men in a scene set inside a darkened cinema.
This being a Michael Mann movie, there’s gunplay. Lots of gunplay. The shoot-out scenes here are carefully orchestrated and stretch on for several tense minutes, surpassing that climactic gunfight in Heat. The whole notion of bad guys in trench coats and fedoras wielding tommy guns and making their getaways in lumbering Fords is cliched, but Mann makes it work. Christian Bale is great as the G-man determined to catch Dillinger while French actress Marion Cotillard play’s Dillinger’s resilient moll. Mann knows that we’ve seen this all before, but it’s still compelling stuff.
