public enemies

John Dillinger runs wild until getting taken down by the feds in Public Enemies, the first film in a while that I saw in the theater. --Not so much that I wanted to see it, but a friend of mine wanted to see it in the theater. To be honest, I wasn't all that impressed, in part because I knew the ending before the film began. The government was going to win. The bank robbers were going to die or be captured. This was not a fault of the film, rather, it was simply an effect of making a historical film. However, it has some value in terms of bringing back into consciousness the folk heroes of the 1930's, what it meant that there were people, criminals, acting like pirates (another Johnny Depp role) running wild and taking whatever they wanted (at least for a time) when the mass of people were quietly suffering deep poverty. I think for the audience, the fact that this was a doomed romance between Johnny Depp and his girl, made it all the more romantic, kind of like the doomed friendship between the two main characters in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Unfortunately there was no reference to the FBI director in women's clothing (as a rumor has it that J. Edgar Hoover secretly sometimes wore women's clothing) but then again, it would not have fit into the movie. Johnny Depp often plays characters like the pirate and now the bank robber Dillinger, who are a little crazy in their self-belief. But the world would be a more mundane, more boring place without Johnny Depp. If you don't believe in yourself, who's going to?