Box office wise, the 2009 piece lost out to other favorites at the time, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Praise was had for the lead acting team as well as the story that was set out to be told, however it was noted that the film didn’t quite meet its goal to become a “compelling drama”. It did even worse with audiences on the ratings platform, bringing in a 59% score with over 250,000 reactions. One of Johnny Depp’s lowest rated films, out of 281 critic’s reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, Public Enemies landed a 68% score. Filling out the cast to tell the story of the historical time in American history, Marion Cotillard plays Dillinger’s paramour, Billie Frechette, Channing Tatum plays Pretty Boy Floyd, and Jason Clarke plays John “Red” Hamilton. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) Purvis is out to make a name for himself within the bureau. Newly appointed to the task of hunting down the robbers by J. Hot on the heels of the Dillinger Gang is FBI operative Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). From here, the main plot picks up as Dillinger relocates to Chicago and continues his bank robbing spree alongside his group of bandits, Homer Van Meter (Stephen Dorff) and Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham). The film opens on one of the most exciting jailbreak stories to go down in history, when Dillinger managed to not only break himself out, but to bring his whole crew along with him. Crime rings ran rampant and America’s fascination with crime syndicates was proven over and over again through newspaper headlines and reels at the head of movies.
During the time, many were looking for a way to make fast money, or any money for that matter.
Taking place during the down and out years of the Great Depression, Public Enemies mostly focuses on legendary bank bandit, John Dillinger (Johnny Depp). Only after importing a crew of Western ex-lawmen (newly baptized as agents) and orchestrating epic betrayals-from the infamous “Lady in Red’’ to the Chicago crime boss Frank Nitti-were Purvis, the FBI and their new crew of gunfighters able to close in on Dillinger.An adaptation of Bryan Burrough’s non-fiction book, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934, the film is a biographical telling of some of America’s most notorious gangsters. He made Dillinger America’s first Public Enemy Number One and sent in Purvis, the dashing “Clark Gable of the FBI.’’ However, Dillinger and his gang outwitted and outgunned Purvis’ men in wild chases and shootouts. But while the adventures of Dillinger’s gang-later including the sociopathic Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) and Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi)-thrilled many, Hoover (Billy Crudup) hit on the idea of exploiting the outlaw’s capture as a way to elevate his Bureau of Investigation into the national police force that became the FBI. His charm and audacious jailbreaks endeared him to almost everyone-from his girlfriend Billie Frechette (Cotillard) to an American public who had no sympathy for the banks that had plunged the country into the Depression.
No one could stop Dillinger and his gang. Edgar Hoover’s fledgling FBI and its top agent, Melvin Purvis (Bale), and a folk hero to much of the downtrodden public. In the action-thriller Public Enemies, acclaimed filmmaker Michael Mann directs Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard in the story of legendary Depression-era outlaw John Dillinger (Depp)-the charismatic bank robber whose lightning raids made him the number one target of J.
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