Not sure why they felt the need to make the title information look like it's spilling from his junk, but whatevs. It's hard for me to like movies based on historical events because it feels like cheating when you already know how the movie is going to end. Still, this is a decent film, although the ham-handed attempts to add a romantic angle fall completely flat for me.
John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is a serial bank robber in the Great Depression. He and his gang routinely elude capture and become such national figures that J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, playing far against type) assigns a special task force of the Bureau of Investigation to hunt them down, led by Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale).
In the movie, Purvis is fresh from the killing of Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum, who gets shot before he can suck too much) but in real life, Floyd was shot three months later. It is a nice set-up to show Purvis' dedication, however, so I'm not mad at them about that.
Dillinger has a sweetheart named Billie (Marion Cotillard) and she is completely superflous. Which is not to say anything negative against the actress. I've liked her in a lot of things. However, she only exists in this film in order for Dillinger to draw comparisons against when he is watching Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama, what would be his final movie-watching experience.
She's not even the Woman in Red who tipped off the cops to Dillinger's whereabouts. That would have been interesting, in that whole Samson-betrayed-by-Delilah kind of way. That was just a Romanian madam trying not to get deported. Accurate, yes, but hardly poetic. It shouldn't have even been necessary, since he was being hunted by The Goddamn Batman.
I thought more could have been made out of the interaction between Purvis and Dillinger and not just because of the slashfic possibilities of a Bale/Depp sandwich. Overall, it's a solid film but definitely just a rental.
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