Released July 30, 2009.
Part of Bryan Burrough’s aim in his book on which Michael Mann’s new film is based was to tell the real story behind the great crimewave in the early 1930s without the Hollywood myth that now surrounds it. Mann could be said to have done the same thing by shooting this gangster blockbuster that tells the story of famed bank-robber John Dillinger in digital HD.
It’s off-putting at first, as Johnny Depp as Dillinger breaks some of his cronies out of prison in a breathtakingly constructed opening sequence. Everything is so crisp and so real that sometimes it feels like you are amongst the action, shooting it yourself. Famed for his tightly organised raids and elegant grace vaulting over bank-floor counters, Dillinger is blunty portrayed by Depp as a man who lived for the moment but was realistic enough to know that his time as a free man was limited.
On his crime spree he crosses paths with other criminal luminaries such as Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson, finds love with the Billie (the beautiful Marion Cotillard of La vie en rose), all the while pursued by the Bureau of Investigation head, J. Edgar Hoover, whose organisation is rapidly mobilising into something more federal, and steely-jawed Christian Bale as agent-in-charge Melvin Purvis.
While both Mann and Burrough succeed in making the individuals more real than their mythic Hollywood predecessors (such as 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde), it almost seems counter intuitive since Dillinger and his exploits were larger than life and his notoriety and fame existed during his lifetime. This tension never fully resolves and after a while you just wish that Mann would let go of the docu-drama style and hold his camera still so that one can appreciate the beauty of the production design. But then, that would be missing the point, wouldn’t it.
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