Despite the promising setup, Public Enemies was, in my opinion, boring. Plain and simple. I kept telling myself that it was a portrayal of a fascinating group of characters in a fascinating time period and that I should be finding this interesting, but I didn't. The movie was either predictable or disjointed the entire time. I know that Dillinger had something of a short criminal career, the bulk of the "interesting stuff" took place over the course of a year - which seems a reasonable time frame for a movie to work with. That year, for all I could tell while watching the movie, took place over the course of maybe a week or two as people in his life were imploded into one another, along with the days, creating a jerky, rushed, story that was probably about as accurate to the real events as Disney's Pocahontas. (Wow, was that really fifteen years ago already?).
Bale's performance was nothing special, though not unpleasent. Depp's classy portrayal of the infamous character was probably the only enjoyable things about this movie. Other than that, the only thing that really stood out was how odd the camera work was, moving around and zooming in somewhat randomly in a style that much better suited Cloverfield.
Between the rushed, confusing story, the boring portrayal of what must have been an exciting piece of history - or at least that could have been entertainingly presented as such - a police force that was shown as laughably idiotic, I enjoyed this movie only slightly more than going about some daily chore that I don't really mind doing. I didn't hate it, but I don't feel I could ever reccomend it to anyone in good conscience when there are so many much better movies out there.
** (2/5 stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment