( CNN ) -- Early in Michael Mann 's vivid , incisive , but half-cocked gangster opus `` Public Enemies , '' Johnny Depp 's John Dillinger returns to jail a few scant months after leaving it . Johnny Depp plays the charismatic John Dillinger in `` Public Enemies . '' Only this time he 's just visiting -- and he 's taking his friends out with him . It 's an audacious opening gambit , and when the getaway gets messy -- one of the gang panics and soon bullets are flying all over the place -- we glimpse another insight into what makes Dillinger tick . As he clings to a wounded comrade for dear life , and stares death long in the face , he has to make a decision : What to do with the guy who panicked and brought this upon them ? Dillinger lets him go . Based on Bryan Burrough 's well-sourced account of the Depression-era crime wave that gave rise not only to Dillinger , but also to a whole gallery of criminal poster boys -- Machine Gun Kelly , Pretty Boy Floyd , Baby Face Nelson , the Barker gang , Bonnie and Clyde -- `` Public Enemies '' whittles the book down to its most dramatic duel : the nationwide manhunt for Dillinger presided over by J. Edgar Hoover ( a knockout Billy Crudup ) and led by his Chicago , Illinois , bureau chief , Melvin Purvis ( Christian Bale ) . Dillinger and Purvis assumed folk-hero proportions in their day . According to Burrough , when newsreels showed Dillinger -- public enemy No . 1 -- he was applauded more loudly than the president . A 20th-century Jesse James , he was an underdog with a reputation for fairness . It was said he never killed anybody , and he was gallant and jocular with members of the public , once offering his overcoat to a kidnapped bank teller he had taken as a human shield . The role is tailor-made for a self-styled rebel like Depp . He understands the outlaw 's swagger , the ferocity that sits hand in glove with his soft-spoken sensitivity . All the romance in the picture comes from Depp : the graceful ease with which he vaults a bank railing , his astonishing self-confidence and his dedicated courtship of hat-check girl Billie Frechette ( an eager Marion Cotillard ) . She 's swept up less by the high life he promises than the passionate conviction of his pitch . Burrough paints Purvis as an ineffectual , even inept agent who was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to nab Floyd , Nelson and Dillinger . The movie has no truck with such revisionism , but betrays little interest in Bale 's dour , narrow lawman . The film 's parallel cop-and-robber structure recalls Mann 's modern classic , `` Heat . '' Purvis and Dillinger meet only once -- to talk -- and then face off just once more , at the climax , to kill and be killed . If the confrontation of Bale and Depp does n't pack the same iconic punch as `` Heat 's '' Al Pacino and Robert De Niro , the ( entirely fictitious ) exchange in a Midwestern jail cell remains central to the film . At one point , Dillinger reprimands Purvis for shooting down Pretty Boy Floyd , extending the poetic license still further -- as a point of historical fact Floyd died several months after Dillinger , and though Purvis was at the scene he almost certainly did n't pull the trigger . But Purvis did coordinate the execution of John Dillinger , an assassination as much as it was an attempted arrest , and maybe the nastiest crime in the picture . So when the incarcerated Depp advises the smug Bale that he should find a different line of work for his own peace of mind , his words carry a certain weight . Still , the movie 's resolve to take Dillinger at face value feels a bit perfunctory , even old hat . At 140 minutes it takes a long time to find its rhythm ; indeed , this is one film that would be better if it were 20 minutes longer . Still , there 's little here that Arthur Penn did n't anticipate 40 years ago in `` Bonnie and Clyde , '' except maybe the intriguing idea that organized crime pulled the plug on the old-style go-it-alone bank robber in a belated attempt to forestall Hoover 's dream of a federal law enforcement agency . For all its loving period detail , the movie scarcely notices the desperate poverty of the times . Shot largely on high definition video , `` Public Enemies '' does n't look like the old gangster films -- it looks like TV . The images gain in immediacy what is lost in luster , but left this spectator looking for more texture , more depth -- more heat . iReport.com : Depp 's best film ? One of the new Hollywood 's last great stylists , Mann is well aware of the sacrifice involved in this transition . You can see it in the loving way he pictures Johnny Depp 's doomed Dillinger watching Clark Gable 's doomed gangster embrace his fate in `` Manhattan Melodrama '' while Purvis and his deputies assume their places outside Chicago 's Biograph Theater . There is something ritualistic about this sequence , as if Dillinger divines some measure of grace from the screen , and we congregants also play our part . The faces change , but it 's the same old movie we remember .
` ` Public Enemy '' is a solid gangster flick that 's not quite great , says Tom Charity . It stars Johnny Depp as bank robber John Wayne . It is terrific , Christian Bale as FBI man is more impressive .