Public Enemies: Critic Reviews

The film kicks you in the balls with awesomeness, but is smart enough not to turn back and keep kicking you until you forget you're being kicked.

With its measured, team-produced screenplay by Mann, Ronan Bennett, and Ann Biderman, Public Enemies makes heavy business of the notion that Hoover ushered in an era of ethically elastic law-enforcement procedures still recognizable today.

Michael Mann's Public Enemies is a grave and beautiful work of art.

It's a picture with virility and confidence, and unlike Dillinger's machine-gun, which the man himself expertly takes to pieces, it never quite jams, and gets off one or two lethal rounds.

Director Michael Mann mounts a technically proficient, visually enthralling crime drama anchored by the low-key but captivating performance of Johnny Depp as legendary bank robber John Dillinger.

Public Enemies, despite packing thunderous rounds of ammunition, is a touch too remote.

Public Enemies has everything going for it except a reason and a script.

Even when Dillinger is at rest, Public Enemies exudes a nervous tension, the sense that flight is imminent.

The underconceived Public Enemies suffers from that lack of drive, though Johnny Depp is so urgent and charismatic as John Dillinger, he provides enough firepower to make the film legit.

Our connections with Public Enemies remain abstract. The darkness and the distance kill the fun.

Amid the summer season of spectacle and silliness, Public Enemies appears as an oasis of adult entertainment.

Public Enemies is as elegant and muscular a film as one could hope for in a summer of flash and noise. Which is not to say director Michael Mann's gangster saga lacks flash and simmer.

... as strange and exhilarating as riding the running board of John Dillinger's fast, shiny, black getaway car.

The best rejoinder to Public Enemies is Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal video... It's a tommy-gun gangster fantasia with a touch of Guys and Dolls, and it's everything Public Enemies isn't.

The movie is emotionally neutered.

Here is a film that shrugs off the way we depend on myth to sentimentalize our outlaws.

It's a fascinating bundle of contradictions--authentic in a million details, deeply romanticized in others. Cool, calm and collected, this is more love story than gangster picture.

Mann excels at staging the chaotic bank jobs and bloody shootouts that were just a day at the office for Dillinger, but even at 140 minutes the movie is so dense with incident that there isn't much room for cultural comment or character development.

Ultimately, the movie's a bust.

It fits neatly on the shelf with Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather.

More interesting than involving, Public Enemies focuses on history at the expense of the characters that lived that history. It's all story without emotional impact.

Public Enemies is a good movie -- sometimes very good -- that could have been a great one.

Thrilling, glamorous, richly textured and breathlessly action-packed, it is one of the best movies of the year.

Overall impact is muted. Oddly, too, the film is somewhat shortchanged by its great star, Johnny Depp, who disappointingly has chosen to play Dillinger as self-consciously cool rather than earthy and gregarious.

The fatally miscast Johnny Depp's smaller-than-life performance as the famed gangster is the central flaw in Michael Mann's disappointing, curiously uninvolving Public Enemies.