Now, I’m a big fan of The Insider, Heat, and Ali so it’s possible I’m looking at this with rose coloured glasses (they’re losing a little bit of their colour with Miami Vice…but hey, at least it was pretty) but I have to say, I’m pretty excited.
Johnny Depp’s performance interests me as his latest characters have been these huge larger than life characters in which he disappears. This one, however, is a little more dialed in, which we really haven’t seen since Finding Neverland.
It also stars Marion Cotillard, who looks purty, and Christian Bale who I really get no sense of in this trailer, nevertheless I am a fan.
Well, it’s a Michael Mann movie, so I’m assuming it’ll be full of tough guys in snazzy outfits, terrific gunfights, and ten-minute mood scenes with pulsating music and no dialogue. I’m there.
My friend is in that preview. The guy getting led by the collar in the bank about half way in with the slicked back hair is a guy I bartended with for about 6 years. Cool!
For me, I’ve always been a sucker for bank robbers (my cousin and I had planned to rob all the banks in my home town before we turned 18 and never really gone around to it.
So yeah, as a youth John Dillinger was sort of my hero so that’s ANOTHER reason why I want to see it. (yes, NOW I understand that he’s really not the greatest role model)
A Michael Mann crime pic with tommy guns, fedoras, Bale and Depp? I’ll be there.
There was something weird about the trailer though, something about the quality of the lighting or colour palette… it looked a bit… TVish is the only word I can come up with.
Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough is one of the greatest books ever written about crime (along with The Outfit by Gus Russo). There is enough material in it for five or six fantastic movies.
The trailer for the movie looks wonderful. My only quibble might be with some of the sets. The bank they were robbing in the opening looked like the Waldorf-Astoria or the Ritz, I can’t believe they were really that plush (especially given the fact that the Dillinger gang mostly took banks in smaller towns).
Still, that’s a minor point, and I can’t wait to see this. Dillinger is one gangster who could easily have made it as a movie star had his life taken a different direction. Good looking, supremely confident, the camera loved him, as shown in the notorious footage from Crown Point county gaol, where he joshes with reporters, arm draped around the smiling prosecutor. (The smile didn’t last. Hoover was made apoplectic by the footage and made sure the prosecutor lost his job).
And I think Johnny Depp was born to play Dillinger!
Nice one.