Some films are so skillfully made and iconic that they almost immediately become templates for how to do a certain aspect of cinema well. If you want to know how to tell a story without dialogue you watch the following scenes in Vertigo, if you want to know how to use sex scenes to explore character development you might watch something like A History of Violence, if you want to see a masterclass in editing then JFK would be a mandatory port of call. Sadly for Public Enemies, Michael Mann's film chronicling the infamous American bank robber John Dillinger, rather than being an example for excellence the only thing it is useful for is pointing out to budding filmmakers how not to do things.
For a start, the most immediately apparant shortcoming is that it boasts some of the worst sound design seen in a major American release this decade. Whenever the oscars come around the sound categories (mixing and editing) are not really understood by a lot of people, but from now on if ever the need arises to point out what sound mixing is, this is it. At times the music overpowers the dialogue making it barely audible, other times the background balance will stay the same then suddenly the voices will become much more loud in the mix, it's so bad it can vary in the space of a sentence where it goes from barely audible to far too loud. It's so bad that it almost seems like there's a problem with the cinema showing the film's speakers, but after the nightmare that was Miami Vice on this front and the fact that this is something that has been complained about in other reviews, it's just what Mann does.
Aside from sounding like it was mixed in Michael Mann's shed, considering this is a film with an alleged $80m budget, when the big shootouts come they look alarmingly cheap. The style is all over the place, on occasion out of the blue it goes in to full blown documentary-style camerawork, at other times rapid movement sweeps in and only makes you aware you're watching a film, it's so shoddy and uneven in the visual storytelling. The actors are constantly groped in close ups which usually brings out more of a performance but that leads onto the next major problem and that is the acting.
Over the last 20 years Johnny Depp has carved out a career for himself which has given him the reputation of being one of the most unusual, inspired, interesting and charismatic leading men in world cinema but Mann has extracted a performance from Depp which actively goes against everything that makes him the actor he is with the appeal that he has. It's bland, it's mannered on occasion and it's only his screen presence which holds it together. Christian Bale gives a sufficiently vapid turn but he, Depp and Marion Cotillard all falter because the bedrock of any film, the script, pulls the rug out from underneath them.
The characterisation in this film is laughably two-dimensional and as such none of the actors have anything to really get their teeth into. Bale's character is a badge with a gun, nothing more, Cotillard's moll is barely even sketched and Dillinger is drawn incredibly superficially and as such it makes it a glorification rather than an exploration. That alone would be enough to impact on all their turns, but Depp and Cotillard have it twice as bad because their romantic relationship is so risibly written. Cotillard on occasion acts like Penelope Cruz did early in her Hollywood career, but here it's not because Marion is having trouble with her English, it's because the dialogue is so wooden and clunky it would be impossible for any actress to deliver the lines well, let alone in a second language. Even Depp is given lines that wouldn't even make the first draft of the average porn film (reaching its nadir in suggesting he and his Prince Albert join a naked Cotillard in the bathtub) and this is the basis of a relationship the filmmakers actively try to take into emotional areas, which is a contradiction they never solve as the attempted powerful scenes fall flat because of everything that has preceeded them.
Mann has created a film that, aside from the prospect of the cast (but not the actual way they're used), has nothing to offer. It's overlong (Collateral is the only one of his last 6 films he's brought in under 130 mins), the action sequences are sub par and drag, the script is poor, which makes the acting suffer, and on top of that aesthetically (both visually and sonically) it's a bust. It's almost impressive the non-performances he gets from a cast that are clearly talented and just how superficial the whole thing is in every single imaginable way. A shining light for future filmmakers on how not to make a big budget commercial film, Mann's career continues to be an insulting shadow of its former self.