It's tough to watch Johnny Depp these days when he's not wearing eyeliner, a do-rag and a monkey on his shoulder. After gooping up "Finding Neverland," glowering vacantly through "Sweeney Todd" and annihilating every sprinkle of dignity in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," how can he be trusted with another larger-than-life character defined by a complicated past?

Depp dials down his weirdness to play gangster John Dillinger and, ironically, this choice sinks the movie. "Public Enemies," despite packing thunderous rounds of ammunition, is a touch too remote. There are no big speeches, no drawn-out death scenes, no gauzy flashbacks. It's a straight-faced, no-nonsense, shoot-'em-up, jailbreak, cat-and-mouse kind of movie.

It's also a double-barreled bummer. There's no excitement in the bank-robbing, no thrill of the chase, no emotion over justice served or thwarted. Depp's Dillinger is neither charming nor despicable, nor does he occupy that delicious gray area between the two. His spree unspools dispassionately, cold as a Colt .380.

Forget feelings for a second. "Public Enemies" looks great. It has that pristine Michael Mann sheen. Colors are crisp. Every shot has a twilighty varnish. Dapper men in dark suits wage war in the marbled halls of capitalism. They lope like wolves into banks, snatch fistfuls of money and retire to honey-hued cabarets to spend their loot, living large in the face of the Great Depression.

Under the stewardship of a prideful J. Edgar Hoover (played by an awkward Billy Crudup, who seems to act mostly with jowls he doesn't have), the FBI strikes back at Dillinger and his peers, first impotently, then savagely. Leading the manhunt is a rigid, stone-faced agent named Melvin Purvis, played by Christian Bale with an introversion even more pathological than Bruce Wayne's.

The movie is a tussle of dark suits and fedoras, with packs of trigger-happy men perforating the dickens out of the Midwest under a Hoover-mandated "national war on crime." Director Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti keep the camera at the shoulders of the actors, holding the action in tight close-ups, rarely stepping back for a wider look. "Public Enemies" feels narrow, not panoramic. It lacks the mustiness of a period piece. It's definitely not a history lesson in disguise.

-- Dan Zak (July 1, 2009)

Contains gangster violence and some objectionable language.