Mannhunting - Public Enemies

June 14, 2023·1 hr 59 min·10 clips

Alex Navarro revisits Michael Mann's 'Public Enemies' and declares the 2009 Depression-era gangster film 'ass' after a decade-long gap.

Mannhunting returns to one of Michael Mann's more divisive movies. The host reads Public Enemies through familiar Mann territory: labor, craft, capitalist pressure, and dudes rocking. Alex Navarro joins in. D'Alessina comes up only through the legal caution around Johnny Depp, which gives the opening a dry little piece of production context. The setup sounds almost too neat. Depp plays Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, while Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, the FBI figure tied to the agency's early reputation. Geography ends up mattering more than expected. The host notes how odd it feels that most of the movie takes place within minutes of where he grew up, apart from the Florida sequence. That personal angle helps. It makes the period setting feel less distant, with Mann's big machinery brushing up against someone's remembered backyard. The strongest complaint is Purvis. The conversation keeps returning to how often he can see danger coming, especially around Little Bohemia, without that instinct turning into a real break with the operation. Stephen Lang gives them the hinge. His character feels positioned to notice that Purvis is overmatched, almost like a soldier stuck in a unit led by an empty shirt. Band of Brothers becomes the comparison. The Foy episode gives the speakers a way to name the war movie hiding inside Mann's crime picture. The frustration is the payoff. The movie points toward a broken unit, then keeps moving as though the gunfight and its warnings have not left a mark. That missing tension nags at them. A line about avoiding a Shirley Temple movie could have landed harder if the film had made those internal disagreements count. Still, the affection is there. The ending treats the argument as part of the fun, with the series moving toward Blackhat, Tokyo Vice, Ferrari, and Heat 2.

As heard by us

A sharp, Mann-literate reading of Public Enemies as a gangster film haunted by bad command and institutional mythmaking.

Waypoint's Mannhunting entry on Public Enemies digs into why Michael Mann's Dillinger film never settles into the clean master cop versus master criminal shape it seems to promise.

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Why you'd press play

A Michael Mann Public Enemies chat that turns into a study of a broken FBI unit.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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