by David Hawkins
Christian Bale’s cold dry hard smile peels off the screen with all the tedium of a tweet. In this film he’s transformed from vigilante outsider (Batman) to vigilante insider (Melvin Purvis, FBI). The potential meditative aspects of his career have been crushed under the sheer weight of machismo. But this man can eat a live snake (Rescue Dawn) – so we’re in business. Perhaps better for boys to be boys than men: the only ‘boy’ herein (Pretty Boy Floyd) is swiftly relieved of his life by a fruity rifle shot from Bale in a bloodstained orchard.
Boys/men, naturally congeal into the gang mentality of Goodies n baddies, cops n robbers. Then a constant flurry of bullets squidges all categories into ambiguity: it doesn’t matter ‘who? what? who? the bazooka was who?’ The viewer is firestormed into admitting their boredom. Bank heists soon cease to be glamorous, elegant and exciting (as in Ocean’s Eleven) and are revealed as the messy extensions of possessive-compulsive behaviour. Women also are disempowered by the dancing tirade of gunshots presented here, oh they’re allowed to be little more than tired holsters for the hot weapons of men.
Depp’s character (John Dillinger) is self-consciously reductive. He announces to his beau, ‘I like baseball, whiskey, good clothes, fast cars, and you – what more do you wanna know?’ [that’s a paraphrase]. At least he’s honest, and this film doesn’t set out to offer more. However, rivetting the frames with shootouts fails to hold the viewer’s attention. What remains in mind is the self-satisfied flicker of the snake-eating smile in a film that is really about the history of American police.
