IndependentThoughtAlarm Reviews

Public Enemies (2009)

Overlong and ultimately disappointing.

[6/10 · 4 July 2009]

I'll spare you any suspense, here. Simply put, Public Enemies is a major disappointment. There is one aspect that the film has going for it, though, and that is the performances. Johnny Depp is great but, as I've read in other reviews, not exactly irreplaceable. Marion Cotillard is fantastic, but underused. Christian Bale is solid, but pretty forgettable. Unfortunately, everything else about the film proved disappointing.

This is the story of John Dillinger, who robbed banks, broke out of prisons, shot a lot of guns, loved a woman he met and didn't spend much time with, and...not much else. At least, that's what Public Enemies would have you believe. So little actually happens in this film it's a marvel they managed to stretch the running time past an hour and a bit.

A short run through: John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) escapes from a prison. Then he robs a bank. Then he meets Billie (Marion Cotillard), and they fall in love. He robs another bank. Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) wants to catch him. Shootout. Bank robbery. Repeat. He gets shot. How long did that take me, 30 seconds? I'm not saying the film was unnecessary, it was just unnecessarily long. So many scenes could have been cut down or just taken away altogether. The shootout near the middle of the film took so long to get through, that about halfway through it I had completely forgotten what it was they were doing. From that point on, it was nothing but bullets, blood, yelling and a lot of flashes from the guns that nearly blinded me.

The film wasn't exactly a treat for the eyes, either. The look of the film was horribly uneven, split evenly three ways between beautiful, crystal clear shots, amateur student film hand-held, and security camera footage. Either one wouldn't have been awful on its own, but it was just so wildly inconsistent that a good chunk of the time I was too distracted, wondering what had happened to the camera (sometimes between shots in the same scene), to worry about the story.

And like I said above, there's not much story to tell here. I'm sure the man had a very interesting life, but there was no real point to the film. It didn't seem like there was any specific story to tell. Quite simply put, it was merely about John Dillinger. "Well, just what about John Dillinger?", you ask. And I don't have an answer for you. Sorry. Either way, the film didn't highlight Dillinger as a hero or as a villain, and while I don't mind the impartial nature of the film in itself, I had a hard time really caring about what happened to him.

The love story was easily the most entertaining part of the film. Too bad it didn't show up much. My favorite parts of the film involved Marion Cotillard, and they didn't last long. What a shame. If they had cut down the major shootout or cut out one or two of the bank robbery scenes that were mostly all the same, they could have focused more on that story and I wouldn't have minded the runtime as much.

So, aside from the good performances from just about everyone involved, there's not much to get excited about here. It was overlong, pretty low on plot, and filled to the brim with unnecessary scenes that had left my mind before I had even left the theater. Such a disappointment. It could have been something great, and it just...wasn't.

6/10

Angels & Demons (2009)

Angels & Demons (Ron Howard, 2009)

[4/10 · 14 June 2009]

OK, everyone. Here's how it goes. Robert Langdon is smart. He knows history and symbols. There is a threat against the Vatican. OK? Following me so far? The threat is from the Illuminati, an organization of scientists vowing revenge on the Catholic Church. Alright? They've kidnapped four cardinals who are supposed to be in the running for Pope. Get it? OK, and the sexy scientist Vittoria Vetra is the expert who knows how to manage the bomb they're threatening the Vatican with. Yeah, OK, as long as you understand, we can get on with the movie. But we'll remind you of all of this in about 10 minutes in case you forget.

This may as well have been flashing on the screen for the entirety of Angels & Demons. On the surface, this doesn't seem like the kind of film that would attract brain dead idiots, but it seems that writers David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman didn't want to take the chance that some mentally challenged 11 year old might get lost in the story. This is my biggest qualm with Angels & Demons, an already mediocre film dragged down to fiery depths of cinematic hell by a completely incompetent script. OK, maybe that's a little extreme, but I couldn't pass up the chance to say "fiery depths of cinematic hell", now could I?

One example of the spoon-feeding nature of the script is the power outage idea. A camera has a live video feed of the bomb, and it's somewhere inside the Vatican. Security decides to turn off select power grids bits at a time so that they could see where to check for the bomb should the camera go dark. This seems easy enough to remember, right? Well, turns out it isn't. Every time the characters are in a room and the lights go out, some side character must remind everyone that security is turning off power at random. They really should have abandoned all hope of a four-walled narrative early on and had Tom Hanks turn to the camera every now and then and say "Alright, so let me get you up to speed here..."

And Robert Langdon. What a great character. Not only does he know everything that could possibly help him in his quest to rescue the four cardinals and stop the terrorist, but he talks about nothing else! I could count on one hand the amount of lines Tom Hanks reads that isn't a historical fact about Italy, the Illuminati, the Catholic Church, or something along the lines of "It should be here!", "We have to go there!", "They must be planning to..." or other cut and paste exclamations.

But it's a good thing that the good guy, Camerlengo Patrick McKenna, is there for guidance. Man, he's such a hero. A real saint. The perfect man for the job. Or, is he? SHOCK! TWIST! Run for the hills, because the suspicious-looking good guy who fits into the plot in nearly no significant way other than to be revealed to secretly have been the mastermind behind the whole plot is...the mastermind behind the whole plot! EEEEKK! But that means that the even more suspicious looking guy who everyone suspects is secretly the villain is...not secretly the villain! Gosh, if only they had given us a chance to figure it out...

Other minor things. Some good, some bad. Good: they got rid of what would have been a ridiculously contrived romantic subplot. The explosion at the end looked pretty. The bad: whose bright idea (pardon the pun) was it to have the light shine into the camera and nearly blind the audience whenever a character is running around with a flashlight? Why is it that two people of Italian origin in Italy, alone, speak English to each other sometimes, but Italian other times? I wouldn't mind if they spoke English the entire time, but the flip-flopping drove me crazy! Don't even get me started on the hilariously obvious and incredibly poorly written (so poorly written it stood out amongst the rest of the poorly written film) speeches about faith vs science. Yeesh.

Really, what a mediocre film. Pretty blandly directed, awful writing, and a phoned-in performance by Tom Hanks. Throw in an incredibly suspenseful "will Robert Langdon die in the middle of the movie?!" scene, a useless female sidekick and no real reason to care what happens to anyone and you can top off what should have been a huge disappointment, but really was just what most of us had expected. Oh, well. They can't all be gems.