10. Public Enemies (2009)
A Michael Mann period gangster flick starring Johnny Depp as notorious outlaw John Dillinger? Oh, boy! Count me in! Or at least, that's how I felt leading up to the release of
Public Enemies, which only managed to surprise me in one way: how undeniably boring it was for the length of its runtime. The cast, the director and the story looked to be entirely in place here, given Mann's obvious talent for handling a narrative of this sort, and - c'mon - Johnny Depp is Johnny Depp. And Christian Bale is here, too? Playing Melvin Purvis, the FBI man who vowed to catch Dillinger? So what we rightly expected, of course, was an exciting, tense movie in the vein of
Heat - a period game of cat and mouse to have us on the edge of our seats. And yet Mann opts to play down the movie aspects that we all wanted to see (i.e. bank robberies) and focuses mostly on Dillinger's romantic life. In the end, all we got was 143 minutes of Depp looking broody. Yawn!