PUBLIC ENEMIES—“I was raised on a farm in Mooresville, Indiana. My mama died when I was three, my daddy beat the hell out of me cause he didn’t know no better way to raise me. I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you… what else you need to know?”

So says John Dillinger (1903-1934), persuasively put over by Johnny Depp, 45), putting cut-to-the-chase moves on hatcheck doll Billie Frechette, played with a mix of sensuality and wariness by Marion Cotillard, 33, fresh off her triumph La Vie en Rose. Later in the story, Billie (1907-1969) cornered yet defiantly loyal, tells a brute from the FBI “When my Johnny finds out how you slapped around his girl, you know what’s going to happen to you, fat boy?”  Whether either of them ever said those things in real life is immaterial; they’re made to suit the storytelling purposes of director Michael Mann’s big-budget 2009 revisit to the early Thirties, specifically the Midwest bank robbery spree and the publicity boon response from the newly emergent Federal Bureau of Investigation. During 140 highly watchable yet simultaneously frustrating minutes, infamous names will be dropped, along with strewn bodies and fudged facts.

Let’s assume you know a touch of pop history/Americana and have seen a few movies, so we’ll dispense with synopsis other than to say that this good-looking, lead-spitting, well acted version of the Depression Days hits a number of its cinematic-dramatic targets, and is easily the biggest— won’t be done again on this scale—tale spin of those robbing hoods and their self-righteous, self-interested pursuers. Yet the end result isn’t the be-all-end-all it portends to be and was advertised as. While gangster flick fans get their Tommy guns worth of action, the script spins the cylinder to play Russian roulette with chronology (blithely out of whack) and accuracy, playing with truth as much as 1973’s Dillinger, but without the snap and sense of open-road anarchy. As always, Mann’s a terrific visual stylist, a master of flow and sense of place (try topping The Last Of The Mohicans); of this project he said “I didn’t want audiences looking at 1933 …I wanted to make them feel like they were in 1933.”  With heavy-hitter stars, a bulging supporting cast, an arsenal of clothes, vehicles and props, and location shooting in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Florida and Arizona (often in the actual event spots), he mostly succeeds, greatly aided by Dante Spinotti’s fine lensing (the night shots particularly striking) and an eclectic, emotions-textured score from Elliot Goldenthal.  Somewhere between eighty and one hundred million bucks was poured in (not counting auxiliary expenditures). *

Yet the gloomy, portentous tone of the script and too many glaring, easily identifiable inaccuracies gnaw away at the foundations. The screenplay by Ronan Bennett was substantially rewritten by Mann and Ann Biderman (Copycat, Primal Fear), and was based (‘suggested’ is better) on the non-fiction book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34, written by Bryan Burrough. His 624 pages  tracked not just Dillinger and chief lawmen Melvin Purvis (played here with cold zeal by Christian Bale) and J. Edgar Hoover (done to apropos creepiness by Billy Crudup) but the other rogues who get shoehorn treatment in the script (Pretty Boy Floyd, Alvin Karpis) or are left out (Ma Barker, the Barrow Gang). It would have worked better as a miniseries, and could have played fairly by not riddling the factual record. Modern audiences, less history adept (like–at all?) or film-versed (earlier versions reaching back to the Forties, and plenty of available books as well) may take the Mann-men opus at face value. Okay, pal, but Buyer Beware, even with the cool actors (doing quite well) and those roaring gun battles. We note that the latter are juiced by sound effects punctuation so keen it should have drawn an Oscar nomination. **

Reviews were polite, the take at home reached $97,100,000, 31st for the year, part of a total global haul of $214,100,000.

Sportin’ duds and packin’ hardware: Jason Clarke, Stephen Dorff (as Homer Van Meter), Stephen Lang, Stephen Graham (as Baby Face Nelson), David Wenham, Peter Gerety (flamboyant bit as Dillinger’s attorney, the corrupt Louis Piquett), Spencer Garrett, Giovanni Ribisi (as Alvin Karpis), Dominic Lombardozzi, John Ortiz, Bill Camp (as Frank Nitti), Rory Cochrane, Lili Taylor, Carey Mulligan, Michael Bentt, Branka Katić (as Anna Sage, ‘The Woman in Red’) Matt Craven, Channing Tatum (as Pretty Boy Floyd), Leelee Sobieski, James Russo, Casey Siemaszko.

* Loot the lot—Depp pocketed around $23,000,000 for about three months of work: Dillinger and his gang in a dozen heists scooped $500,000, adjusted in 2026 to $12,460,000. Of course they had to deduct for ammo. Then, if you care to test figures v. impact, consider the nibble a few flashy punks made during the Depression against how much damage J. Edgar’s G-men and their successors have done to little things. Like justice.

** Shoot first, interrogate later—Dillinger (1945), wildly overrated teacup fiction; Baby Face Nelson (1957), entertaining B-fodder; Gun’s Don’t Argue (1957), great title, cheapskate production; The FBI Story (1959), a commercial for the Bureau, pretty decent with the shootouts; Pretty Boy Floyd (1960), total make-believe fizzle; Young Dillinger (1965), gawdawful; A Bullet For Pretty Boy (1970), fiction, with Fabian, who’s not bad; Dillinger (1973) John Milius attacks like a windy lion at red dawn with action galore and a great cast; The Lady In Red (1979), written by John Sayles, which kind of makes up for casting Robert Conrad. Almost.