Hoover selects Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) to head up his Chicago office, bag Dillinger, and thus prove the FBI's prowess to a doubting FDR and Congress. Hoover thinks he is picking the perfect guy for the job. Purvis, a dead shot with a rifle, unites field experience with Hoover's "scientific" methods, such as wiretapping. But Purvis can't get anywhere with Hoover's college-boy recruits. By the time he persuades Hoover to call up seasoned lawmen from Oklahoma and Texas, the legal version of flop-sweat has set in. Bale gives an admirable, self-effacing performance as a fellow who feels as if he's getting in over his head, inch by inch.
In this film, Dillinger's mentor, Walter Dietrich (James Russo), lays down two laws before he dies: Never work with men you don't know, and never take a job when you're desperate. Dillinger ends up doing both. So does Purvis.
The movie is about the mistakes that gangs, agencies and countries make when they begin to think that it takes cold-blooded tactics to restore order. Hoover's War on Crime starts to resemble the War on Terror. On the other side of the law, "organized crime" cracks down on freelancers like Dillinger. By the mid-30s, bank robbers who draw police attention threaten the steady income that the Mafia has developed by monopolizing betting.
Mann keeps his laser-like focus on prison escapes, stick-up jobs, getaways and shoot-outs. Yet his style isn't merely surgical. Working in high-definition digital, with framing as exact and surprising as a sharpshooter's gun-sight, Mann makes you experience, viscerally, the difference between a true man of action like the keen, intelligent Dillinger - and the hysterical blowhard Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), a quick-on-the-trigger maniac.
The movie shows you sights you've never seen before - not with ostentatious set pieces or Transformers-like special effects, but with historical vignettes, such as long flares lighting up nighttime crime scenes for newspaper photographers and newsreel cameras. With impeccable casting in every scene, Mann manages to give the film an epic solidity. He fills even tiny roles with players who bring conviction to them, such as Lili Taylor, Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang.
Depp operates like a star in more ways than one: He holds everyone in place with his gravitational pull. He and Mann bring a complicated consciousness to the gangster film. When the anti-hero steals into "the Dillinger squad" of the Chicago police department, you see the impact expand in Depp's face as he puts together a rough draft of his gang's history from an array of annotated mug shots.
