Watching Michael Mann's Public Enemies I felt like I had missed the first film. The movie plays like a rise and fall story (sort of like Soderbergh's Che, which was split into two halves) but there's no rise; the movie opens with John Dillinger at his bank robbing peak and then follows him down. The problem here is that without a rise story the characters surrounding Dillinger are nobodies; while their deaths as the gang is chipped away by Melvin Purvis and his G-Men are meant to show the decline of Dillinger's fortunes, they play more like the deaths in a slasher movie. Fodder characters getting offed, without any sense of who they are, or why we should really care beyond the fact that Mann casts delightfully recognizable actors in almost every role, no matter how minor, in the film. Good night and farewell, young Stephen Dorff, but I had no idea who the hell you were in the movie.

To be fair and open, the distance I felt from Public Enemies wasn't all that different from the distance I feel at most Michael Mann films. Mann doesn't seem to care about the same things that I care about, and even in the Mann films that work best for me - Heat obviously being one - there's nothing for me to really grab a hold of beyond the technical. Ali is the one Mann film that ever really moved me, and that surely because of the natural - almost supernatural - merger of the charismas of Will Smith and Ali himself. It's a magic performance, and it makes the movie.

There's no such magic performance in Public Enemies. At the very end of the film Marion Cotillard, finally given something to do, shows a ferocity that, properly used earlier in the film, could have been something magical. She's so good in these final scenes that I actually felt bad for dismissing her earlier in the picture; she speaks with a really bizarre accent that no one seems to notice, and she has a modestly mechanical aura about her (probably brought on, I learned, by the fact that she had to memorize the English dialogue exactly and couldn't adjust it or play with it on set). But the final minutes... the movie closes on a shot of her and it's perfect and it makes you wonder what a film about her character, a woman who because of her partially Native American genetics was an outcast who found a man who found a way of turning being an outcast (outlaw) into being a hero, would have been like.

But that isn't Public Enemies. At its heart Public Enemies is a fairly standard picture, a 'Crime Doesn't Pay' movie that spends much of its running time tut-tutting Dillinger's inability to create anything that resembles a plan for his future. At the other end of the spectrum is the stiff, professional figure of Melvin Purvis, a guy who along with the fledgling FBI (still without the F for Federal part of their name) is creating the very procedures that would come to define procedural movies. It's a study in filmmaker schizophrenia, as Mann focuses on and seems to like Dillinger but you can tell that he really feels Purvis.

In fact Purvis, played with the usual lock-jawed intensity of the ever intense Christian 'Intense' Bale, is the character who has the most trouble. He's just trying to do his job and he's caught in between two flamboyant attention whores. On one side it's Dillinger, who boasts that he can take any bank in under two minutes and who escapes lock up with a gun carved from soap, and on the other it's J Edgar Hoover (a really excellent Billy Crudup, mining depths in a short screen time), who is looking to become America's iron fisted protector. Poor Purvis is just trying to do his job - professionally, coolly, like a Michael Mann character - but he keeps getting fucked up by the flighty bank robbing bumpkin and the fussy publicity hound director.

I suppose that there must be something that Mann likes about Dillinger. The guy was incredibly successful at what he did, although the movie goes out of its way to point out that what he did was only a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of money the Mafia pulled in daily from gambling alone. He was also friendly, amiable, funny and apparently a real Robin Hood. What I found most interesting in the film is how Mann seems uninterested in deconstructing Dillinger; this film mostly presents Dillinger the Myth, and I never fully came to understand what made him tick, just what made him Great.

Johnny Depp was born to play roles like this, bad guys with so much charisma that you come to believe they're good guys. Dillinger's big problem as a character, though, is that he has no idea what's about to happen to him; he doesn't even begin to consider retiring from the bank robbery business until his entire gang is dead and the mob tells him they're through with him (his penny ante hold ups are bringing real heat on the Mafia, and they're furious that his antics are forcing the feds to create laws about interstate crime, their bread and butter). This means that Depp gets fewer colors to play; without a sense of impending doom, Dillinger is essentially the same guy at the beginning of Act Three (just a little more desperate) that he was at the beginning of Act One.

Then again, who's going to complain? Watching Johnny Depp take part in old-timey Thompson machine gun fights is one of the film's main pleasures. It's a Michael Mann movie, so you know the action will be satisfying, and there's one shootout, where Dillinger and his guys are holed up in the woods with Babyface Nelson, that's a classic.

The other element of Public Enemies is the digital video. Michael Mann has said that he wanted the movie to feel not like a period piece but to feel vital. He wanted it to be like you were there in the 1930s. I didn't quite get that impression. What I did get was the feeling that some guy with a video camera was in the 1930s. A not particularly great video camera. Which is crazy, as I'm sure Mann was using top of the line equipment. But that doesn't change the fact that while the cinematography (from the masterful Dante Spinotti) sometimes looks gorgeous at other times looks terrible. It's mostly in extreme light situations that the digital video shows every single one of its flaws - softness, blurring in motion, a really pixelated video look. Mix that with Mann's seeming proclivity for live, unsweetened audio - ie, you can hear different background hisses depending on where the mic is in relation to other objects - and the film sometimes carries the impression of a college project.

I sat through all of Public Enemies without a complaint, but without ever being really transported. Will the hardcore Michael Mann fans love it? Likely, as they'll probably get from it what they get from his other movies that continues to elude me. While Public Enemies is a well made, well acted, well written film, it's one without a spark at the center to make it truly special.

6.5 out of 10